An unintentionally hilarious quote to end your week

As you may have heard, the Washington Times is up for sale, because the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s children can’t agree on whether to continue to shovel money down the black hole that is the “newspaper”. Apparently the entire operation is coming apart:

Meanwhile, staffers who have survived a series of draconian layoffs report that snakes and mice have slipped into the newspaper’s building because the owners can’t afford exterminators to combat the infestations.

“There was a three-foot-long black snake in the main conference room the other day,” said reporter Julia Duin. “We have snakes in the newsroom.”

And this differs from the paper in its heyday….how?

Thanks everyone, you’ve been a great audience. I’ll be here all week. Don’t forget to tip your waitress.

And this differs from what they’ve been doing….how?

For three decades, the Moonie Times has been a wingnut tract masquerading as a newspaper. While its correspondents, many of whom champion the Christian right cause while working for a guy who managed to get himself crowned the Messiah in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, found their way onto shows like Meet the Press as journalists, the fact remains that the Washington Times was about as much a newspaper as Fox News is a news channel.

Well, the Rev. Moon’s plan for World Domination via the press has run aground:

With the announcement that 40 percent of the Times‘ staff is getting pink-slipped, and that the daily’s no longer even going to bother with traditional who/what/where/when/why reporting, instead publishing an opinion-heavy publication that will be free of charge at a diminished number of local outlets, Times owners look like they’re angling to be a Weekly Standard wannabe, churning out lots of predictable GOP Noise Machine opinion
prattle. (Paging Andrew Breitbart!) What is clear is that the daily’s days as a functioning newspaper are now over.

R.I.P. The Washington Times.

At this time of reflection, it’s worth pondering two rather astonishing facets about the Times and its bizarre life and looming death. The first is the deep irony of how the Times, a clarion voice
of partisan right-wing values, was run as a charity for nearly three decades and
whose business model made a mockery of the free-marketplace system supposedly
cherished by conservatives. The second is the even deeper irony of how the
Times was owned by a delusional prophet whose apocalyptic visions made an even bigger mockery of the Christian values supposedly cherished by conservative activists.

Indeed, the woeful
Times has for decades stood at the center of a Beltway marriage-of-convenience for the ages, as conservatives nearly developed cataracts turning a collective blind eye to the glaringly obvious contradictions that Moon’s worldview created with conservatives. (FYI, Moon proclaims to be more powerful than God, that Jesus was a failure, and that dictatorial rule is best. Hmm…..)

Good night, and good riddance.