Ronald Reagan, the governor of California, arguing that King had it coming

[kpete]

Another, even more prominent conservative said it was just the sort of:

“a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws they’d break”

Reagan would later equivocate on these views, allowing that the Fair Housing Act, for instance, had “hastened the solution of a lot of problems.” Yet he remained, at best, startlingly tone deaf on anything to do with race, and unwilling to say anything that might alienate his political constituency. On the day of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral, for instance, Reagan called the assassination of America’s greatest civil rights leader, “a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws they’d break”—an astonishing exercise in moral equivalizing, which seemed to associate King’s agitation for enforcement of the civil rights guarantees already embedded in the constitution, with the action of his own murderer.

http://www.kevinbaker.info/c_lnpfm.html

*************

....King was the man who taught people they could choose which laws they'd break--in his soaring exegesis on St. Thomas Aquinas from that Birmingham jail in 1963:

Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. ... Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong….

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/

another link:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/dr-king-and-conservatives.html

[TlalocW]

1. Reagan wasn't tone-deaf. He knew what he was doing, and what he was doing was

Appealing to racists. That remark, some video footage I saw of him as California governor eating grapes with a shit-eating smirk on his face (in response to Cesar Chavez), starting his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, whose only claim to fame was the killing of civil rights workers in the 60s (and being sure to lace his speech with plenty of references to states' rights) - this was all calculated.

TlalocW

[ProgressiveEconomist]

2. Didn't Reagan kick off his

1980 campaign at the Neshoba County Fairgrounds in Mississippi? Didn't his podium stand on or near the very spot where the bodies of three famous murdered civil rights workers (Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner) had been found years earlier?

IMO that could NOT have been a coincidence. He and his handlers must have known that they were sending a signal to the completely-white Republican parties of the South: Happy days are here again!

[TlalocW]

4. I know it was in Philadelphia, Mississippi

Which is where the civil rights workers were killed. There's no way anybody would start off their campaign in such a po-dunk place that had only one thing associated with it unless they were sending a message.

TlalocW

[MisterP]

3. and also vindictive law-n-order types, like the ones screaming for blood in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya

[dana_b]

5. you are so right

He appealed to people like my grandmother who was a racist Republican and of course loved him. (Unfortunately for her, her daughter - my mom - grew up to be a liberal Dem who detested Reagan).

Break the unions, appeal to the white right and go after the poor, sick and disabled. What a scum bag.