Oh gee. It's "Martin Luther King was really a conservative" day. It seems like it comes earlier every year. Roy Edroso reads the paeans to King's conservatism so you don't have to. This one in particular is a real pip:
At National Review, for example, Roger Clegg and Hans von Spakovsky wish to celebrate the Day with state legislation "outlawing government racial preferences" -- not in the old-fashioned civil-rights sense of Jim Crow laws, but in "the politically correct version that discriminates against whites, and often Asians (particularly in college admissions), by giving preferences to other racial or ethnic groups like blacks and Hispanics." Because if there's one thing that burned Dr. King's butt, it was some black kid getting into college and thus freezing out some deserving honky.
On last August's Up with Steve Kornacki show about Martin Luther King, Rick Perlstein drew attention to St Ronnie of Wingnut's comments just after the assassination to show just how broken up the conservatives of 1967 were to see today's alleged avatar of conservatism shot down in his prime.
He said he had it coming. He said, "it's the sort of great tragedy when we begin compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws they would break."
He's referring to civil disobedience. This was pretty much a consensus view on the right among the same people who celebrate Martin Luther King now. Frankly, Martin Luther King had to be forgotten before he could be remembered. Martin Luther King called himself a socialist. Jesse Helms wasn't pulling that out of nowhere. His associate, Daniel Levinson, probably had been a communist. And the main demand of the march for jobs and freedom was a phrase that was resounding at the time but we don't remember it now, "a Marshal Plan for the cities", which meant a massive federal investment in developing the depressed areas of america. Which I don't think we heard in Washington [this past week-end]
As I wrote in my post last August on this, it's probably a form of progress that they want to be associated with him today, but the history has to be completely re-written to make it work.