The controversy surrounding the Washington Post hiring Republican Ben Domenech to be a resident blogger is fueled, in large part, by the fact that the WaPo is yielding to conservative complaints and trying to create an unnecessary “balance” between a far-right activist and a liberal that doesn’t exist.<\/p>\n
A secondary element of the uproar, however, is not just that the Post has hired a far-right blogger, but which<\/i> far-right blogger.<\/p>\n
There are conservatives with blogs who are serious people. They have years of professional experience in journalism and politics. Their worldview is on the right, but they’re serious about policy and issues, whether I agree with their work or not.<\/p>\n
Domenech, 24, was tapped for this highly-prestigious position despite not fitting this mold at all. Media Matters has helped summarize many of Domenech’s “greatest<\/a> hits<\/a>.”<\/p>\n * Domenech, responding to James Dobson’s comparison of the Supreme Court to the KKK, said Dobson didn’t go far enough. Domenech went even further, writing that that “[t]he worst black-robed men and women are worse then [sic] the KKK.” He also asked rhetorically: “In the past 30 years, how many innocent lives has the KKK ended? How about the Judiciary?”<\/p>\n * Domenech called Coretta Scott King “a communist.”<\/p>\n * Domenech harshly criticized his now-colleague Dan Froomkin, agreeing with a commenter who called Froomkin “an embarrassment to the saner heads at the paper.”<\/p>\n * Domenech posted portions of an article by First Things magazine editor-in-chief Richard John Neuhaus, in which Neuhaus cited the “astonishingly inordinate incidence of crimes committed by young male blacks and the equally inordinate incidence of abortions procured by black women,” adding that “[i]t just happens that killing black babies has the happy result of reducing crime.”<\/p>\n