MLK Redux

Wouldn't you know. Not long after HazZzmat put out its salute to the spirit of Martin Luther King, the Washington Post yesterday (probably the NYTimes as well) ran a scurrilous, expensive, full page ad by the ACLU exploiting Dr. King to score points against the Bushies. Briefly alluding to Dr. King, the ACLU copywriters dove right into the real reason for their ad. Beneath a large picture of Dr. King, the ACLU denounced the fact that years ago, the FBI had wiretapped MLK. They then bridged to the present, attacking George W. Bush for doing the same nefarious thing to American citizens. (Hardcopy newspaper only, sorry, no link.)

This is typical of the kind of Gramsci-inspired misinformation and propaganda that the ACLU regularly promotes to obscure historical fact and advance its collectivist political agenda that involves weakening this country's defenses and legal system.

Point in fact: MLK was wiretapped because the FBI, and the Kennedy and Johnson administrations under attorney general Robert Kennedy—still an icon of the left—rightly or wrongly suspected Dr. King of being supported by or having ties to the Soviet-inspired left. Kennedy himself authorized the wiretaps, and this fact is artfully glossed over by the ACLU's propagandists, since RFK's sacred memory must be maintained to hold the left's misleading mythologies intact. The ACLU would never blame anything on the Democrats, so the responsibility is shuffled, by implication, to J. Edgar Hoover, second only to Joe McCarthy in the left's pantheon of Great Satans.

Second point in fact: In both the cases of the MLK wiretaps and the current Al Qaeda-oriented wiretaps, presidents/attorneys general of both Democratic and Republican administrations okayed limited domestic wiretaps for essentially the same reasons—it was suspected that one or more domestic individuals were aiding and abetting the enemy in a time of war. For Kennedy-Johnson, that would have been Vietnam, a very long battle in the longer Cold War, now being judged by historians as very probably WWIII. For W, that would be the GWOT, arguably another flavor of the Cold War, and for that reason, probably WWIV, whose current long battle is the ongoing Iraqi Conflict.

Whatever the merits of the King wiretaps, they are water over the dam, and never had a real impact, obviously, on MLK's freedom of speech. Likewise this is true of the current wiretaps which have targeted only U.S. citizens with a high probability of making contact with our current enemies.

The ACLU ad defames Dr. King, constructs a fantasy-history that never was, and uses both acts as a tool to prevent the current president from defending our country against an enemy that has no allegiance to any government nor recognizes any government as legitimate, particularly one run by infidels. The ad is very clever in that it does not contain any real misinformation. Rather, the ad commits what Roman Catholics would call a "sin of omission" by neglecting to provide inconenient details that would serve to undermine the implied argument in the ad. Thus the implied suspicion and accusations stand, but they are not supported by crucial facts which have been omitted. Cute. Alarmingly effective, too, particularly for increasingly under-educated Americans today who are increasingly unable to sort out the mythologies of the 1960s and the New Left of that era.

There's not much we can do about the ACLU's scurrilous, slanderous ad except point it out and use it as yet another example of of how the hard left, inspired by the example of the Popular Front (in which the ACLU had its historical origin) and the subversive writings of Antonio Gramsci, continually alters language, re-shapes perceived history with that language, warps the legal system and the educational system from within, and exploits the free press to carry on their agenda of dismantling the United States and its cherished institutions by transforming free speech into a potent weapon for destroying the American way of life.

Just thought you'd like to know.