Following the Washington Post's recent hiring of Republican activist Ben Domenech to launch the Red America weblog on washingtonpost.com, Media Matters for America has begun a review of some of Domenech's more interesting comments posted on Redstate.com, a partisan Republican blog he helped establish, and other sites. As we noted earlier today -- March 22 -- Domenech recently referred to Coretta Scott King as a “communist.” Our ongoing review has also uncovered the following quote from Domenech, under his reported pseudonym “Augustine,” in which he was apparently referring to the upholding of a woman's right to an abortion by the federal courts: “In the past 30 years, how many innocent lives has the KKK ended? How about the Judiciary?”

This comment followed an earlier remark he made in same thread on Redstate.com. In response to a RedState.com diarist who cited James Dobson's comparison of the Supreme Court to the KKK (documented by Media Matters here), Domenech wrote:

Actually, Dobson's soft-pedaling it. The worst black-robed men and women are worse then [sic] the KKK, and not just because they have the authority of the state behind them. They don't even use the vile pretense of skin color -- they dismiss the value of all unborn lives, not just the lives of ethnic minorities.

On Redstate.com, Domenech also has:

• Called a pro-choice poster “a pathetic little Kossack.”
• Agreed with a commenter who called Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin “an embarrassment to the saner heads at the paper.”
• Posted portions of an article by First Things magazine editor-in-chief Richard John Neuhaus. In the passage, 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." Neuhaus went on to state that “those who style themselves black leaders, especially political leaders, are overwhelmingly in support of the unlimited abortion license, thus maintaining their distinction of being the only ethnic or racial leadership in history to actively collaborate in dramatically reducing the number of people they claim to lead,” and that "[w]hite racists have reason to be grateful for what is sometimes still called the civil rights leadership." Domenech did not comment on Neuhaus's statements.

As Media Matters noted March 21 in response to the launch of Red America, Domenech was an editor at the conservative Regnery Publishing Inc., with extensive partisan political credentials and limited experience as a journalist. In his introductory Red America post, Domenech asserted that “unhinged elements” of the Democratic base “have dragged down the Democratic Party for too long.” He also criticized the Post's editors and the “mainstream media” in general for, among other things, “treat[ing] red state Americans as pachyderms in the mist,” being “slow to recognize the growth in conservative America,” and failing to recognize “the greatest pro-gun movie ever,” the 1984 Patrick Swayze/Charlie Sheen vehicle "Red Dawn."