Saturday, September 3, 2011

The Once And Future Dr. King

Some Classic Roy Edroso here on the GOP's new Marxist bogeyman:  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  No, seriously.  Apparently having a black President and Dr. King finally getting his own memorial in Washington DC has broken conservative reality badly enough to the point where Dr. King is now Bill Ayers or something. To whit:

A longer-lived staple of conservative anti-racist cred has been their effusions over Martin Luther King, Jr. Yes, back in the old days they hated King ("For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country" -- National Review. More here!). But when things got a little hot for them, bigotry-wise, they shifted to declaring King a good conservative; on every MLK Day, in and among their many confused tributes, you'll see many that insist King's vision of a color-blind society is exactly what conservatives have been trying to do all along. Then they grab parasols and handkerchiefs, burst into "When The Saints Go Marchin' In," and dance around. It's a grisly sight.

But then we get this piece from the Moonie Times (Title, "Martin Luther King's Mixed Legacy".  Yeah, if you're a student of the struggle for civil rights in the 20th century, wrap your head around how Dr. King broke even at best.)

King’s leftism ultimately betrayed his original civil rights creed. His call for a color-blind society was contradicted by his multicultural progressivism. Affirmative action, racial quotas, government handouts to minorities - these policies directly violate the basic principle of equality under the law. Contemporary Americans are not judged as individuals, but as members of a racial group, gender or ethnicity. This is a perverse inversion of the very kind of racialism prevalent in the Old South. More than 40 years after his death, we are further away from being a genuine meritocracy. Victimology and racial set-asides dominate large swathes of American life, from university admissions and government bureaucracies to big business and construction. The country has slowly Balkanized, splintering along ethnic lines. 

And this "Well, us white people will always resent you colored folks until you get over this whole slavery and reparations thing and just accept the fact we've got a 150 year head start on you in this country and always will" thing is standard boilerplate Black Republican nonsense, but rarely has the vitriol of (insert liberal here) been applied to Dr. King.  But, as Roy points out:

But conservatism has gotten crazy enough that you can try something like that, it seems. Any day now we'll see them burning effigies of Alexander Hamilton because he sold us out to the mercantilists (substitute "Jews" in some jurisdictions). Or maybe Lincoln -- I mean, what was that Civil War about? Statism and giving black people a new bunch of so-called "rights"! The boys at Free Republic have been all over that shit for years; they used to be considered fringe, but compared to what's coming, they're Rockefeller Republicans.  

At this point, when will the Tea Party Republicans start running on the platform to remove the King Memorial and to get rid of MLK Day in January because the idea of holding King in high regard itself becomes another anathema, just like old, evil liberal socialist tropes like "Teachers are good people" and "Infrastructure helps all Americans" and "Science is America's way forward."

Or, you know, like "Presidents deserve basic respect."  Liberalism is an idea, and hey, you can destroy ideas all day long, folks.  Republicans do it daily

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