What Would Martin Have Said?

In the decades since civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated, we’ve seen some pretty brazen appropriations of his legacy.

But Pentagonistas have topped even the most outrageous of these.

Last Thursday, Jeh C. Johnson, general counsel for the Defense Department, at a commemoration of King’s legacy asked and answered his own question:

I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack.

..... I draw the Good Samaritan parallel to our own servicemen and women deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, away from the comfort of conventional jobs, their families and their homes. [They] have made the conscious decision to travel a dangerous road and personally stop and administer aid to those who want peace, freedom and a better place in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in defense of the American people. Every day, our servicemen and women practice the dangerousness -- the dangerous unselfishness Dr. King preached on April 3, 1968.

No, they can't get away with this: sanitizing this bad war with their sanitized Martin Luther King: MLK would have said of BHO's Afghanistan-Pakistan project the same thing he said about LBJ's Vietnam-Cambodia project: that it is counter-productive of American national interests. 

I'll let the un-sanitized Dr. King speak for himself: