Hobbs Would've Been Manning The Firehose

Wade Munday points* us to a press release by the TNGOP which seeks to exploit the death of Martin Luther King Jr. for partisan gain.

Look, yes, MLK may have at one time been a Republican. There was a time when the Southern Democratic Party was run by Conservatives, and Southern Conservatives were, and many still are, racist fuckers. In MLK's time, the Democratic party was the only [viable] party, and therefore the electoral battles between liberals and conservatives were fought out in the primaries...and generally, the conservatives won.

When Martin Luther King was alive, he was castigated on the pages of the National Review as a communist sympathizer, anti-American, trouble maker. When he died, he did so supporting a labor strike by Memphis Sanitation workers...which party is vehemently opposed to labor unions? From his final sermon:

That's the question before you tonight. Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job. Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" The question is, "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.

Its intellectually dishonest for William Howard Hobbs and Robin Smith to try and claim Martin Luther King as one of their own. In fact, the worst thing that can happen to a liberal is to die young because 20 years later the Conservatives will cherry-pick and distort their words and actions to claim them as one of their own. They do it with JFK as well, claiming that because he lowered the top marginal tax rate from 90 to 70, that means he would've been a Reagan Democrat.

The difference between Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson is eloquence and a bullet. If MLK had never been shot he'd still be ridiculed, cussed at, and denigrated by the same Southern Conservatives now pretending he was one of them.

*It was actually a post by Jeff Woods at the Nashville Scene

Update:

Speaking of which, I think it might be of interest to note, the first Republican elected statewide in South North Carolina was Jesse Helms who ran and won in 1972 as part of Nixon's "Southern Strategy" of winning over old Dixiecrats.

In 1983, when the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday came up for debate, Sen. Helms introduced an amendment to "express the sense of the Congress that the President should grant a full pardon to Marcus Garvey of any crimes of which he may have been convicted."

Marcus Garvey was famous for trying to send Black people to Africa, and he once said, "I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together."

(I'm still trying to find a Senate Roll call from the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday to see if Republicans then loved Dr. King as much as they seem to now.)