That’s probably the most Dean Martin-ish of all Dean Martin records, and since I didn’t get to post it as I usually do during the holidays, since it snowed all day here yesterday, and since I miss Dean terribly, there it is. Speaking of snow, if I was like the climate change-obsessed (Science!) and had no shame, I’d cite the MLK Day storm along with the fact that it didn’t snow once the whole year when I first came to Northern Virginia over 50 years ago as evidence that Al Gore’s pet issue is a lot of over-hyped hooey. I’m not like Them, however, so I won’t.

Now, some MLK Day ethics notes:

1. Stop making me defend Joe Biden!

The conservative media and its pundit piled on President Biden for saying yesterday, of all days, “Even Dr. King’s assassination did not have the worldwide impact that George Floyd’s death did.” It is a strange and annoying statement to make on a holiday honoring King to be sure, but Joe’s brain-fog is likely to make him say all sorts of strange things. That statement is, sadly, spot on. Dr. King’s life had a historic impact on the U.S., but his assassination made less of a ripple world wide than the death of Princess Diana. Here, there were race riots in several cities (especially D.C.) following his death in April of 1968, but they were less destructive than the previous summer’s rioting. President Johnson used the riots to speed the passage of his signature legislative package, the Civil Rights Act of 1968. It probably would have been passed anyway, but that’s just speculation. MLK Day celebrates the importance of King’s life, a catalyst for civil rights advances, the end of Jim Crow policies in the South and the nation’s acceptance of integration. George Floyd, in contrast, had no positive effects on society while he was alive. It is absurd that his death, a non-racial episode exploited by activists, led first to the massive rioting it did and the subsequent rise of Critical Race Theory-inspired indoctrination in schools as well as intense DEI-fueled discrimination against whites across all sectors, but it is undeniable. Would some other incident have triggered the same response if moral luck hadn’t claimed the life of Floyd? Sure. Nonetheless, Biden was right, just as he would have been right to say the assassination of an obscure Austrian duke in Sarajevo had more “worldwide impact” than the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

2. On the other hand, Biden’s MLK Day tweets (which he doesn’t compose and probably doesn’t even read), included this..

“Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s bust sits inside the Oval Office — handpicked by President Biden — as a reflection of President Biden’s promise to America: to restore the soul of America, to rebuild this country from the bottom up and the middle out, and to unite it,” reads the White House’s caption on social media outlets including X and Instagram.”

That’s false, like so many lies that come from Biden and the White House that would have been added to a “lies database” if Trump’s team had issued the equivalent. Spencer Brown reminds us that, as the Washington Post reported in 2021, “[b]usts of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy flank a fireplace” in Biden’s Oval Office. The MLK bust was added to the Oval under President Obama, and Trump kept it, “though he moved it to a different area of the room.”

3. Some hard-right conservatives escalated criticism of King and his holiday.

Morons. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk last week declared that “MLK was awful” while warning, “We’re gonna be hitting him next week. Yeah, on the day of the Iowa caucus, it’s MLK Day. We’re gonna do the thing you’re not supposed to do. We’re gonna tell the truth about MLK Jr.” Compact correctly compares this sour grapes to the statue-toppling and renaming mania that has wiped out (or tried to) honors to Christopher Columbus, Robert E. Lee, Woodrow Wilson, and the Founders, among others.

The question Kirk and likeminded right-wing iconoclasts must ask themselves is whether they are truly prepared to undo the achievements of the civil-rights movement in their hatred for the legal developments that have transpired since 1964—in other words, to make the case that Jim Crow-style laws are acceptable. If they aren’t, then talk of destroying King’s legacy will only serve to further their own marginalization from the American mainstream, given that the overwhelming majority of their compatriots view King’s legacy positively. And if they are prepared to rethink the entire civil-rights revolution, well then … let’s have that ugly debate out in the open, instead of channeling it into tired accusations about the man’s plagiarism, womanizing, Communist Party links, and the like.

As it turned out, Kirk’s threat was a bluff, and just gave foes of his organization fodder to attack him. We heard nothing from Turning Point yesterday.

4. The FBI posted this tweet, and got exactly what it deserved…

5. In a related unethical comment from someone who has no business running for President…

Robert Kennedy Jr. told Politico the day before MLK’s day that his father was justified in ordering wiretaps on King, and here is his logic:

RFK and his brother the President were “making big bets on King, particularly in organizing the March on Washington…They were betting not only the civil rights movement but their own careers. And they knew that… J. Edgar Hoover was out to destroy Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement and Hoover said to them that Martin Luther King’s chief was a communist. My father gave permission to Hoover to wiretap them so he could prove that his suspicions about King were either right or wrong. I think, politically, they had to do it.”

Oh. It was necessary to violate King’s rights because the Kennedys had to protect themselves politically, and RFK Jr. sees nothing wrong with that. That’s exactly the kind of warped reasoning and ethics rot that led President Richard Nixon to try to bug DNC offices at the Watergate.