Republican Dirty Tricks

Having nothing to boast about in reality, some months ago Republicans calling themselves “Raging Elephants” put up a billboard in Houston disingenuously stating that Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican.   In short, MLK was no Republican.

King made great efforts to remain non-partisan, aligning himself with “causes” not political parties…. but a man who said, “…a guaranteed annual income could be done for about twenty billion dollars a year. And I say to you today, that if our nation can spend thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth…” …doesn’t exactly sound like a Republican.

It’s not surprising.  We can reasonably expect the Right Wingers among us to attempt to rewrite King’s legacy to suit their ideological agenda because they have nothing in reality to boast about.  Seriously, what are they going to say?  “Vote for us!  We’re the party that shifted the tax burden from the rich to the middle class -creating the widest gap between rich and poor since the Gilded Age by telling the middle class that “brown people” were coming for their money!”

The co-opting goes on whatever the agenda.  Obama himself basically felt the need to apologize to King’s legacy as he justified his continuation of Bush’s war crimes while accepting the “Nobel Peace Prize” for… basically… not being George W. Bush.

Now Obama’s Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson has reached new levels in revisionist history by stating,

“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.”

Jeh Johnson would like the poor, sad, suckered American People to believe that Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who said, “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death” would get the posthumously endorse an illegal war based on lies that is perpetually killing and wounding thousands of soldiers, and millions more in the Middle East, draining our treasury as our citizens suffer at home with the consequences of Reaganomics and crumbling infrastructure… and our very presence in the Middle East continues to do nothing but create more violent extremists while making corporate contractors extremely wealthy.

The only thing Johnson’s remark serves to reveal is the utter confidence Johnson has in the stupidity of his audience and their complicity in the perpetual wars Johnson’s Pentagon has a vested interest to maintain.

According to the People’s Daily: The United States is the largest exporter of military equipments accounting for 30 percent of global arms exports for the period 2005-2009, according to the new data on international arms transfers published recently by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute(SIPRI).

The United Sates also spends more money on “Defense” than all other nations on Earth combined.

These alarming statistics, our perpetual foreign conflicts, coupled with the revisionist history turning the Peace Movement’s icons into cheerleaders for war are nothing less than a threat to our democratic republic and the maintenance of a free people.   Don’t just take my word for it… take it from one of our Founders:

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

— James Madison, Political Observations, 1795