Wesley Pruden, Racist

Poor Wes "Klansboy" Pruden. He's boo-hooing to Howie Kurtz about how big, bad Bill Clinton called him names. The Putz, ignorant of history, plays along.

Washington Times Editor in Chief Wesley Pruden, for example, accuses Clinton of "a little bit of McCarthyism."

Writing about the Whitewater investigation in "My Life," the former president blames in part the "avowedly right-wing" Washington Times, "financed by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, and edited by Wes Pruden Jr., whose father, the Reverend Wesley Pruden, had been chaplain of the White Citizens' Council in Arkansas and an ally of Justice Jim Johnson's in their lost crusade against civil rights for blacks."

"Typical Clinton," says Pruden, who grew up in Arkansas. "That was my father, who's been dead 25 years. It has nothing to do with me. No one has ever accused me of being a racist. . . . There's certainly a strong implication that I don't like blacks because my father didn't like blacks." Clinton "has a perfect right" to criticize the paper's coverage, he says, but "I don't know why he'd accuse me or the Washington Times of being racist."

President Clinton doesn't accuse Pruden or the Moonie Times of being racists (at least in Howie's excerpt). So stop soiling your sheets, Wes.

And Pruden's wrong about another thing. I accuse Pruden of being racist.

Take this example:

When he sat down for a long interview with Southern Partisan not long after his promotion, Pruden left little doubt about where he would lead the paper.

After singling out the Southern culture warrior, Sen. Jesse Helms, as a political hero, Pruden bragged about his great-grandmother shooting a Union cavalryman and boasted that the Times was the most "in-your-face" conservative newspaper in America. When Robert E. Lee's birthday rolls around every year, he said, "I make sure we have a story" -- especially because the occasion "falls around Martin Luther King's birthday."

...

The Rev. Pruden's son has avoided commenting on his father's politics. But in 1995, the Times ran two long op-ed pieces by the senior Pruden's old Citizens Council cohort, "Justice Jim" Johnson.

As recently as 2000 Pruden called dear Daddy's racist pal "my old friend." And just last year, Prudie protested too much that his old racist friend didn't really want the Klan's endorsement for Governor. Klansboy ... uh ... forgets to quote Johnson's repudiation of the endorsement, perhaps because IT NEVER HAPPENED.

Sorry, Klansboy, you can bury your Daddy, but you can't hide the stench of your racist pals.