Posted on 11/01/2007 6:04:11 AM PDT by coffee260
From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today, the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for blacks.
Are you saying that is in error?
Actually you cannot prove The premise is wrong, since the sum of your proof so far is to attack the man’s character rather to attempt to prove he was a democrat.
To prove he was a democrat all you would have to produce his voter ID or some other record of his party affiliation.
Since we don’t have any recorded statements on how he voted especially from the left, it is logical to say that they do not want his party affiliation known or even discussed since it would then follow that he of course should belonged to them.
In truth however because the majority of attacks on him originate from the ranks of his followers and the ranks of democrat operatives instead of republicans logic again tells us that they would prefer that for what ever reason his name should be degraded to a lesser stature.
It is therefore also logical to believe that they might do so to hide the fact that he was a Republican, the attacks being a much greater distraction then the actual truth.
It is a simple slight of hand in misdirection that the liberals are famous for, similar to what they did to Thomas Jefferson,when they said he had a slave mistress and children, like they did to Abraham Lincoln when they suggested he was a cross dressing homosexual, and like they did to both JFK and RFK with tales of debauchery and drug abuse in the White House.
All done in order to protect the abuses of Bill Clinton by tearing down the publics ideals of their previous presidents.
The democrat party will tear down the image of any man or woman in politics to achieve it’s goals, even FDR and Elenore have been subjected to the such tactics to boost the stock of Bill and Hillary, why should MLK be any different?
He’s not, but as the article suggests logically he would have been a republican based upon the times he lived in and the situations he had to deal with. The democrats had very good reasons to prevent Blacks from trying to vote, They were not voting democrat and neither was Dr. Martin Luther King.
Again, the premise of this article was to state MLK, Jr. was a Republican until his death in 1968. He wasn’t. Also, again, he was not a Conservative. He believed in the mantra of big government to the solutions of the Black community. We have witnessed in the 4 decades since that government “help” has done unto the Black community far worse than the wildest dreams of a delusional racist Klansman (in either harming or killing Black people).
Let me address this again. As a Southern Black, it makes sense that he should've been Republican, but by all accounts, he tried to appear to be more of a non-partisan (indeed, he "lifted" a speech (Let Freedom Ring) delivered by a Black Chicago Republican Minister delivered to a Republican National Convention in 1956), but it was quite clear his leanings were to the left. As for the Democrats keeping Blacks from voting, that was largely an issue with Southern Democrats. Northern Democrats had already been manipulating the Black vote for 30 years or more in some instances by that time. In my state of TN in Memphis, the infamous Democrat political tyrant, Boss Crump, "allowed" Blacks to vote so that he could control statewide politics... but they were only allowed to vote Democrat (and they got nothing out of it with respect to actual representation). But ultimately, after 1960, I would find it doubtful that MLK, Jr. ever cast a Republican ballot, he certainly didn't Presidentially (his father didn't, and it's likely he followed suit).
Nowhere in that article does it state that he was a republican at the time of his death, nor does it say that he was a fan of big government, those are your words and your characterizations of the man.
The Four decades of help to the Black Community you speak of occurred mostly after Dr. King’s death only because Democrats saw to it that Blacks were placed into a position where they had to depend upon the liberals for proper care and feeding through programs like the Great Society.
You can show me nothing that would prove that MLK was directly involved in such massive government expansion or even had a hand in it, other then to protest for the right of blacks to vote the consciences and to demand their basic rights as human beings. The whole strategy of the liberals during the 1960’s was to buy out the black vote away from Dr King with dead end social programs that left the recipients worse off then when they started.
And yet you would suggest that Dr. Martin Luther King willfully wanted that to happen, to enable the very same people in the south that had for at least a hundred years denied them and him right to vote as well as the most basic of civil rights, to tighten their grip on the lives of black people through even more government.
and your best proof is how hated he was by those very same democrats.
Show me one speech of Dr King’s where he demanded big government, one speech where he demanded that blacks be locked into housing projects with no hope of empowerment, and show me one speech where he said that the government was the cure for all the injustices that blacks had suffered at the hands of the democrats.
But until you can, don’t tell me he did.
The ENTIRE implication of the article was to state he was a Republican because he was somehow “fighting Democrats.” I could be called a Democrat because I fight Republicans, and it wouldn’t be true. I fight Establishment Republicans and RINOs because I am a Conservative. Again, let’s make this simple, MLK, Jr. was FOR and supportive of big government solutions to Black community problems. He was not a Goldwater Conservative. He was not an individualist. He was anti-Vietnam, he was pro-labor, and those just for starters. He was hunting around for causes by 1968 to get himself involved with to keep himself relavant.
I have little hesistation in calling him a Socialist. But as I’ve written throughout this thread, it is ridiculous that he has been made the singular face of the Civil Rights movement. It is an insult to the legacy of untold numbers of Blacks (and Whites) that participated in the movement and gave their lives for it, many of whom had far higher moral and ethical standards.
True. Read "Conscience of a Conservative". Goldwater was truly non-racist, in contrast to LBJ (quote, "n*****s will vote for the democrats for 200 years"). He just hated the idea of federal mandates. He fully believed in civil rights. He also correctly predicted the rise of affirmative action, race-based set asides, and that it would eventually hurt blacks more than it would ever help.
Now, in order to answer the question, "Where do we go from here?" which is our theme, we must first honestly recognize where we are now. When the Constitution was written, a strange formula to determine taxes and representation declared that the Negro was 60 percent of a person. Today another curious formula seems to declare he is 50 percent of a person. Of the good things in life, the Negro has approximately one half those of whites. Of the bad things of life, he has twice those of whites. Thus half of all Negroes live in substandard housing. And Negroes have half the income of whites. When we view the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double share. There are twice as many unemployed. The rate of infant mortality among Negroes is double that of whites and there are twice as many Negroes dying in Vietnam as whites in proportion to their size in the population. ...We must develop a program that will drive the nation to a guaranteed annual income. Now, early in this century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation, as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual's ability and talents. And, in the thinking of that day, the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber. We've come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operations of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. ...
Now our country can do this. John Kenneth Galbraith said that 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. ...
I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about "Where do we go from here," that we honestly face the fact that the Movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's market place. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, "Who owns the oil?" You begin to ask the question, "Who owns the iron ore?" You begin to ask the question, "Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two thirds water?" These are questions that must be asked. - Martin Luther King - August 16, 1967
and I thought I was on your ignore list....
There is....
Nothing in that speech says it is the governments job to create a system of government run gulags for the black man to live in like was done with the projects,
Nothing in that speech says the government must pay with our tax dollars a permanent salary to poor people just that they will not be poor any more.
No where in that speech does it say that those that won’t work should be paid as much (or sadly more) then those that do.
It is an opened ended question of what can be done or could be done that barely suggests what should be done and had no influence on what the democrats had already had done by the time he spoke it in 1967.
Nope, nothing Socialist 'bout that. Nuttin' at all. ;-)
That speech is about as damning as they come, dude.
I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -- the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income. ...We have come to the point where we must make the nonproducer a consumer or we will find ourselves drowning in a sea of consumer goods. We have so energetically mastered production that we now must give attention to distribution. Though there have been increases in purchasing power, they have lagged behind increases in production. Those at the lowest economic level, the poor white and Negro, the aged and chronically ill, are traditionally unorganized and therefore have little ability to force the necessary growth in their income. They stagnate or become even poorer in relation to the larger society. ...
Two conditions are indispensable if we are to ensure that the guaranteed income operates as a consistently progressive measure. First, it must be pegged to the median income of society, not the lowest levels of income. To guarantee an income at the floor would simply perpetuate welfare standards and freeze into the society poverty conditions. Second, the guaranteed income must be dynamic; it must automatically increase as the total social income grows. Were it permitted to remain static under growth conditions, the recipients would suffer a relative decline. If periodic reviews disclose that the whole national income has risen, then the guaranteed income would hgave to be adjusted upward by the same percentage. Without these safeguards a creeping retrogression would occur, nullifying the gains of security and stability. ...
The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. - Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).
Not to me, you see one actually earns income, one doesn’t receive income.
You receive welfare or charity, Clearly Dr. King was talking about an earned income that had a national fixed level that would allow those that worked to earn enough to survive.
Can you say minimum wage?
What is a minimum wage if not a national fixed income for poor people, the trouble is you have to earn it.
Nothing is being given away here, income is income, a wage which is earned, and there isn’t a socialist, communist or even the most die hard liberal that would ever even suggest that every poor person in the world or this country at least ,should be given money for doing nothing at all.
Yikes, this guy was even more of an economic menace than I had remembered. Rather than champion individualism, entrepreneurship and the like, he addressed the inequities of the Black community by championing Marxism as a solution ! He had little idea of how capitalist economies thrived and sounded like he contributed mightily to the disastrous economic situation that welfare state pols championed.
I don’t see how you can read those speeches and positions and not recognize he was clearly Socialist.
To guarantee an income at the floor would simply perpetuate welfare standards and freeze into the society poverty conditions.
Isn't that exactly what the liberals did?
They created a massive welfare state where they controlled the masses through handouts instead of helping hands.
but wait there is more,
The democrats never tied the minimum wages to the whole national income, instead they have always used the minimum wage as a tool to gain the votes of the poorest among us, Oddly enough they very things Dr King wanted to prevent....
Some liberal lackey he turned out to be...
Yeah, a real Republican alright. It’s no wonder he would oppose our being in Vietnam, since he would sympathize with Ho’s “revolution.”
Liberation theology, also known as total nonsense crap.
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