She's Gone And She Ain't Never Coming Back.

Jeralyn Merritt, that is.

In May I'd been hopeful that JM might one day edge away from the precipice, maybe after the primary craziness ended.

Nah.

She's outsourcing commentary to Robert Stacy McCain, whom she evasively calls a "conservative reporter." Yeah.

That same year Coombs recruited a reporter from a paper in rural Georgia, Robert Stacy McCain, to work at the Times as his national assistant editor. McCain belonged to the neo-Confederate hate group League of the South, which routinely promotes slavery apologias and favors a "second secession" of the South from the Union. By 2002 McCain had been promoted by Coombs to edit the Times's Culture Briefs section. In short order, McCain turned that section into a bulletin board for the racialist far right. At Coombs's behest, McCain attended four American Renaissance conferences as a Times correspondent, only once reporting criticism of the group's white supremacist agenda.

[snip]

McCain's views on race are well-known among his colleagues. In August 2002, according to Archibald, during a discussion in the newsroom about civil rights, McCain defended slavery as "good for the blacks and good for property owners." "We were just appalled," Archibald said. "He is just a complete animalistic racist."

One of the side effects of losing your bearings, as Merritt clearly has, is you align yourself with nasty people -- simply because they share your point of view.