Presidents Join Mourners at King Funeral

I think its good that Mrs. King is getting all of the respect that she rightfully deserved

NPR played bits of Clinton's and Angelou's eulogies from the funeral. Both were excellent and very humorous.

It's a shame that Carter and Lowery had to intrude on a ceremony honoring Mrs. King by making disgusting political statements.

Never pass up an opportunity to make a partisan political speech over a dead body. It adds poignancy and gravitas.

See, Bush does not hate black people...

Never pass up an opportunity to make a partisan political speech over a dead body. It adds poignancy and gravitas.

I hear ya on that. +1

Dr. King would have done it, and I'm sure Ms. King, who was vocal in her feelings about injustice, would have approved. Those of you objecting, I take it, haven't been to too many black funerals. This was a big one, of course, but it wasn't anything unusual. Leave it to right wingers to not understand how these things differ from WASP funerals.

Smothering the King Legacy With Kind Words
by Norman Solomon

Hours after Coretta Scott King died, President Bush led off the State of the Union address by praising her as "a beloved, graceful, courageous woman who called America to its founding ideals and carried on a noble dream." For good measure, at the end of his speech, Bush reverently invoked the name of her martyred husband, Martin Luther King Jr.

The president is one of countless politicians who zealously oppose most of what King struggled for -- at the same time that they laud his name with syrupy words. It wouldn't be shrewd to openly acknowledge the basic disagreements. Instead, Bush and his allies offer up platitudes while pretending that King's work ended with the fight against racial segregation.

Now that Dr. King's widow is no longer alive, the smarmy process will be even easier: Just praise him as a beloved civil rights leader, as though the last few years of his life -- filled with struggles for economic justice and peace -- didn't exist. Ignore King's profound challenge to the kind of budget priorities and militarism holding sway today.

On Tuesday night, the president was eager to seem like a fervent admirer of Martin Luther King. But the next day, in the same House chamber where Bush spoke, his administration pushed through a vicious budget measure that will slash $39 billion in spending -- mostly for student loans and Medicaid for the poor -- over the next five years.

Nearly 38 years ago, Dr. King was killed in Memphis while leading the Poor People's Campaign for an economic bill of rights. He'd been accusing Congress of "hostility to the poor." The federal government, King pointed out, was appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity" -- but "poverty funds with miserliness."

Today, a slick rhetorical formula enables current generations of such miserly politicians to keep praising the legacy of Martin Luther King while sticking knives into it.

Such duplicity is facilitated by a baseline of media coverage that automatically recycles the truncated versions of history promoted by the politicians who dominate Washington. At least dimly, those political hacks understand a key axiom described by George Orwell: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

Don't want to deal with calls for progressive change in the nation's economic power structures? Then don't mention Martin Luther King's statement, "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

Don't want to acknowledge King's assessment of global class war? Then just keep referring to his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech while carefully bypassing his later oratory about "capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries."

Want to keep King boxed as scarcely more than a Jim Crow foe? Then ignore his fierce opposition to the Vietnam War and his broader denunciations of what he called "the madness of militarism."

President Bush has no tactical interest in criticizing the positions that were central to Dr. King's final years. Instead, aided by media eagerness to sanitize King's political evolution, Bush and his right-wing compatriots pose as admirers of King while they desecrate his spirit every chance they get.

After Coretta Scott King died, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund said: "I'm concerned that people don't take her passing as an opportunity to further antique the causes that she and her husband and others stood for." Theodore Shaw added, "Anybody who thinks that work is over is either terribly ignorant or willfully blind."

Whatever his blend of ignorance and intentional evasion, President Bush is a leader of forces striving to roll back the King legacy of activism for social justice and peace. Sadly, the news media continue to be part of that retrograde political process -- whitewashing instead of informing.

Norman Solomon's latest book is "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." For information, go to: www.WarMadeEasy.com

See Spam above

I was listening to an Abbie Hoffman speech in the other day when he made a statement about the day Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, that went something like this. "And LBJ came on [television] and shed a tear, takes a tricky make-up man to do that stuff, and he said 'My fellow Americans, in the memory of his name we must be nonviolent.' And I put down a joint and said 'Holy @!$%#, LBJ's a pacifist, I didn't know that!'"

So presidents, current and former, use the occasion of a person's death to gain some positive PR. What else is new? Well, that three or four of them do it at once, I suppose. I'm sure anyone who is fooled by this only recently learned who Coretta Scott King was on television anyway.

[blockquote]What experience do you speak from that leads you to believe Dr. King or his wife would be as disrespectful as Carter or Lowery?[/blockquote]

My experience of hearing both Dr. King and his wife speak truth to power, always.

Disrespect?

More like respect for the people to stand up to those who disrespect US!

Fine, we can all argue about what Dr. King or his lovely wife would have said if they had been speaking but come on, that's just a waste of breath.

This will play out as the Paul Wellstone funeral did. The Wellstone funeral wasn't a black funeral so don't make excuses for yesterday. I have no problem with people digging on Bush but Mrs. King was no radical and some of the statements said yesterday just lacked the class and civility her and her husband fought for.

Mrs. King most certainly did speak out against Bush policies. If that makes her a radical, she would have been proud to be called one. This call for class and civility is hogwash. Did you hear the cheering at that funeral? The people there appreciated what was being said. Carter was a friend. The Reverand was a friend a close worker with Mrs. King. These are the people who knew her on a personal level, and they said the sorts of things she was known for saying. She was anti-war, so making comments about the war was quite appropriate. Are you supposed to bury her beliefs along with her body? Play nice for the white folk?

This is nothing more than political cover because for once Bush was forced to hear how a non-selected audience thinks of him. So instead of talking about the issues, people are suddenly lecturing the people in that church about how they ought to have behaved instead. If that isn't insulting, I don't know what is.

What would Dr. King think of his wife's funeral? Why not read a eulogy he gave himself at the funeral for the little girls killed in the Birmingham bombings. Whaddya know? He condemns politicians during the eulogy. His audience understood, and so this the audience for Mrs. King.