-MLK Jr. on Vietnam
Sounds rather "damning" to me.
From later in the same sermon:
"The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support and all the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps, where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go, primarily women, and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the towns and see thousands of thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the United Buddhist Church. This is a role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolutions impossible but refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. I'm convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam"
No.
Was the "I Have A Dream" speech a model of patriotic but pointed rhetoric?
Yes.
Did Martin Luther King, flawed though he was, put his life on the line in the fight against racism?
Yes.
Was Barack Obama even willing to put his membership in a particular church on the line in order to do the right thing?
Not even close.
Now, I've chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
Seems like MLK was damning Barack as well. As for the second section you quoted, we've got one sermon based on him being misinformed or prejudiced against the military vs. Jeremiah Wright preaching hate for forty years or so. MLK's flaw was that he placed non-violence at the top of the moral hierarchy, where it clearly doesn't belong. To list the things Wright has put on the same pedestal that don't belong there would take more time than we have.
NO SALE.