Matt Yglesias

National Review and Martin Luther King, Jr.

If I were a National Review writer, I just wouldn’t say anything at all about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I’d be afraid that whatever I wrote, someone would want to start talking about articles like Will Herberg’s commentary on King’s Nobel Peace Prize “’Civil Rights’ and Violence: Who Are the Guilty Ones?”, The National Review Sept. 7th, 1965:

For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country. With their rabble-rousing demagoguery, they have been cracking the “cake of custom” that holds us together. With their doctrine of “civil disobedience,” they have been teaching hundreds of thousands of Negroes — particularly the adolescents and the children — that it is perfectly alright to break the law and defy constituted authority if you are a Negro-with-a-grievance; in protest against injustice. And they have done more than talk. They have on occasion after occasion, in almost every part of the country, called out their mobs on the streets, promoted “school strikes,” sit-ins, lie-ins, in explicit violation of the law and in explicit defiance of the public authority. They have taught anarchy and chaos by word and deed — and, no doubt, with the best of intentions — and they have found apt pupils everywhere, with intentions not of the best. Sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind.

But Kyle-Anne Shiver is more courageous than I would be:

By all measures, Martin Luther King Jr. was a true leader. Barack Obama, on the other hand, is just another politician — one who has demonstrated far more regard for the interests of teacher unions than for the children they are paid to serve, far more regard for the pro-abortion lobby than for the future of the black community, and far less good sense than the average person has when it comes to picking a spiritual mentor.

The positions and values of Senator Obama stand mightily against those espoused, and what’s more, practiced, by Martin Luther King Jr. Based on all these considerations, I think it is quite probable that King, were he alive today, would not vote for Barack Obama.

And of course there’s plenty more where that first blockquote came from. Maybe National Review should leave assertions about the Civil Rights movement to conservative outlets that didn’t exist in the 1950s and 60s. Run this stuff in The Weekly Standard.