"I have a dream...."

[J. J.]

MLK opposed the Vietnam war.
Conservatives would hate him if he was around today.

Well, here is what Dr. King really said:

A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor. [/i]


http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html

He first is complaining about the cost and second about how we're sending troops there, basically the draft.

Now, on the first, cost is a conservative issue.  He goes further to say, in effect, "This is draining funds from programs I want."  I would argue that cost was important, but I'm not so sure that he would have approved how those programs developed in the 30 years after this speech.  On thast, I'm more in agreement with Malcolm X.

On the second point, there were conservatives who opposed the draft even at roughly the same time.  James C. Miller, III, later Reagan's head of OMB, and a (conservative) candidate for US Senate from Virginia in 1994, actually wrote a book c. 1970, calling for the abolition of the draft, including the grounds that minorities were more likely to get drafted.

Ironically, the only serious proposal for a draft recently was from Charles Wrangel, a liberal, African American Democratic Representative from NY.

[J. J.]

On the second point, there were conservatives who opposed the draft even at roughly the same time.  James C. Miller, III, later Reagan's head of OMB, and a (conservative) candidate for US Senate from Virginia in 1994, actually wrote a book c. 1970, calling for the abolition of the draft, including the grounds that minorities were more likely to get drafted.

Ironically, the only serious proposal for a draft recently was from Charles Wrangel, a liberal, African American Democratic Representative from NY.

It's Bush who started this war in Iraq, you can quit trying to blame it on liberals.

I make no reference to Bush or the Iraqi war; you've shown your lack of reading comprehension abilities again, jFRAUD.  I place no blame on liberals for wanting to restart the draft; I place the blame solely on Charlie Rangel, who introducted the bill.  He thought it was a good idea, ironically.  Now, except for a few members, the vast majority of the US House, ond a vast majority of the members of each party, thought that was a bad idea and rejected it.  The military opposed it.  That isn't blaming anybody, except Rangel and the handful that favored it.

Tell me, jFRAUD do you support reestablishing a draft?

[J. J.]

i hate to rain on the pc parade......but id rather see a holiday honoring james merideth, or the black kids that risked their lives at little rock central high school, or the black students who led the sit-in at the woolworth, or what about the college kids who died in mississippi while trying to register black voters?

yes mlk was a good speaker and his heart was certainly in the right place.  but other than that, he was a pretty nasty person.  he had some pretty serious character flaws...wife beating, adultery, plagiarizing, etc, etc.

I treat the holiday has honoring all those who believed in and fought for, equal civil rights.  I'm a beneficiary.