Greetings from Washington, D.C. Flung far from my native California to talk about my new book Bad Moon Rising, I found myself on this alien planet, many of whose inhabitants consider it common knowledge that the Washington Times (available around town in cheery orange newsstands marked “Brighter. Bolder”) is published by, of all people, Reverend Moon (above).

At the progressive Take Back America conference, I overheard a conservative National Review writer insisting to panelist Rick Perlstein that Moon’s paper has become a thing of respectability, now that editor John Solomon is turning things around and mainstreaming the Times. Well, we agree on one thing; Mr. Solomon, a distinguished veteran of the AP and Washington Post, brings much-needed credibility to the Reverend Moon, who is always in need of it. Moon’s old editors suffered a PR hit a couple years ago when Max Blumenthal revealed them in The Nation to be an up-with-white-people brigade who seemed, at times, to be using the Times to re-enact the Civil War.

Moon considers the Times his face around the world, a way to get people like George H.W. Bush on board, to boast to foreign governments that he’s no mere cult leader, but an admired publisher in the world’s most powerful city. And the neo-Confederates were terrible* representatives for him; with their habit of promoting obvious racists, they treated the Times, his $3 billion marbled gift to right-wing conservatives, like a barnyard.

So now the hiccups have been removed from the prestige-generating engine; the paper will continue to endow the church with a certain glow that wouldn’t otherwise be achieved by separating Japanese widows from their life savings and showcasing 45-minute orations by Moon detailing why “the sexual organs are concave and convex.”

Had it not been for the Times and Washingtonians willing to sell their reputations to Moon, the founder of the church might have left the American scene long ago, rather than living it up in mansions along the Hudson River and continuing for years to turn American lives upside-down.

So how’s the new Times? Yesterday’s issue looked fine–and aside from a goofy article about how the Right is underrepresented in the media…oh, and a piece by marriage-obsessed church member Cheryl Wetzstein about young girls who catch STDs from older men–could almost pass for that of a regular newspaper, except for being crammed with op-eds about how we’re winning in Iraq, etc.

* From a PR standpoint, that is. From a moral standpoint, they were merely the latest racist fringe funded by the Unification Church (which, Le Monde reported, gave millions in the ’80s to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s vile National Front).