“[T]his latest dust-up reported by the FishBowlDC and Big Head DC Web sites shines new light on huge continuing problems for The Washington Times if Fran Coombs is presumed ascendant editor-in-chief of to succeed Wesley Pruden, Jr. at the newspaper,” George Archibald, a former reporter at the Times for more than 21 years writes today.

He calls Robert Stacy McCain, who offered his resignation to the Times yesterday after a newsroom fit of gigantic proportions, “an ill-tempered racist who sat on the other side of my desk for many years and carried on loud telephone conversations almost every day full of racist and ultra-right comments, and often got into loud verbal fights with both reporters and editors in the newsroom.”

“Stacy McCain…who has run the Page A2 Culture page for The Washington Times for many years under national editor Kenneth Hanner and Managing Editor Francis B. Coombs, Jr., is a friend of neo-Nazis such as William A. White of Roanoke, Virginia, and had the favor of Coombs and his wife Marian Kester Coombs, who in her own right has a long-reported history of white-supremacist writings,” according to Archibald. “Fran Coombs and Stacy McCain for many years have ridden roughshod over newsroom colleagues of all ethnic and other backgrounds at The Washington Times with their explosive and vitrioloic racist white-supremacist tirades on a frequent basis.”

McCain has yet to respond to these allegations.