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Glenn Beck decided to repeat his asking-black-conservatives-dumb-white-guy-questions show with a new round, this time evidently focused on Harry Reid's remarks. Unlike the last time, there weren't any open embarrassments, except for the moment when Beck agreed that poor people are "like a domesticated animal [that] never learns to hunt."

But again, Beck hijacked the words of Martin Luther King Jr. He opened up the show with a King quote written on a chalkboard.

And it really is shameless. Conservatives nowadays love to claim King as one of their own. And it's a complete joke -- because when King was alive, conservatives were the people he had to combat.

Rick Perlstein described this some time back:

When Martin Luther King was buried in Atlanta, the live television coverage lasted seven and a half hours. President Johnson announced a national day of mourning: "Together, a nation united and a nation caring and a nation concerned and a nation that thinks more of the nation's interests than we do of any individual self-interest or political interest--that nation can and shall and will overcome." Richard Nixon called King "a great leader--a man determined that the American Negro should win his rightful place alongside all others in our nation." Even one of King's most beastly political enemies, Mississippi Representative William Colmer, chairman of the House rules committee, honored the president's call to unity by terming the murder "a dastardly act."

Others demurred. South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond wrote his constituents, "[W]e are now witnessing the whirlwind sowed years ago when some preachers and teachers began telling people that each man could be his own judge in his own case." Another, even more prominent conservative said it was just the sort of "great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they'd break."

That was Ronald Reagan, the governor of California, arguing that King had it coming. 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."

That's not what you hear from conservatives today, of course. What you get now are convoluted and fantastical tributes arguing that, properly understood, Martin Luther King was actually one of them--or would have been, had he lived. But, if we are going to have a holiday to honor history, we might as well honor history. We might as well recover the true story. Conservatives--both Democrats and Republicans--hated King's doctrines. Hating them was one of the litmus tests of conservatism.

I lived in a conservative town in a conservative state at the time, and I remember how deeply and viscerally people hated Martin Luther King when he was alive. And for years after his death, conservatives fought his legacy. They opposed a national holiday in his honor (Jesse Helms, that conservative icon, launched a filibuster against the proposal). Even today, many conservatives believe the old Bircherite smears that King was a Communist.

I thought Beck had a phobia about Communists. After all, the allegations that King had "Communist ties" are about as well grounded as Beck's own charges that Van Jones was a "self-proclaimed Communist."

But I guess when they make for handy stage props for phony discussions about race with a carefully selected audience -- shows which rapidly devolve into whinefests by black conservatives about being pegged as sellouts -- he'll look the other way.

Now, I dunno about sellouts. But anyone who thinks "conservative values" were anything but a hindrance to the black community for most of this country's history is just plain ignorant.

Especially if you know anything about what Martin Luther King Jr. actually stood for when he was alive -- and who his enemies were. They were conservatives. And for them to try to claim his mantle now is a travesty and a joke.

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If you didn't watch Rachel Maddow's debate with Pat Buchanan Thursday night, you missed an outstanding display of corporate media-financed white supremacy.

Pat Buchanan repeated the same exhausting argument that Judge Sotomayor is unqualified for the Supreme Court and therefore doesn't deserve the nomination -- in fact, she's been elevated, in Pat's estimation, based solely on race and not intellect. He said to Rachel:

I don't think Judge Sotomayor is qualified for the United States Supreme Court. She has not shown any great intellect here or any great depth of knowledge of the Constitution. She's never written anything that I've read in terms of a law review article or a major book or something like that on the law.

Oh.

So qualifications are suddenly important to Pat.

While pissing all over Judge Sotomayor's qualifications, judicial record, accomplishments and achievements, Pat Buchanan thinks Sarah Palin! is qualified to be President of the United States.

Sarah Palin -- who couldn't accurately describe the duties of the vice president during a nationally televised vice presidential debate. Remember this?

I'm thankful the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president if that vice president so chose to exert it in working with the Senate and making sure that we are supportive of the president's policies and making sure too that our president understands what our strengths are.

Sarah Palin -- a politician who's less intellectually curious than George W. Bush, has less experience and fewer credentials than the worst president in American history. And Pat Buchanan thinks she's the best Republican ever. Presidential material.

But Judge Sotomayor is intellectually unqualified for the Supreme Court, right? And Sarah Palin is qualified for the highest office in the land.

What conclusion can we draw from this inconsistency? Easy. Pat Buchanan hates brown people. Read his latest awful editorial and tell me this isn't true. If he doesn't hate brown people, he simply, then, believes white males are far superior in almost every way (to be fair, he admits to Maddow that blacks can run fast).

He continues by complaining that white people are being discriminated against and this is a terrible crime. What Pat Buchanan will never admit is that for every one Frank Ricci, there are literally thousands of Americans with dark skin or "exotic" names who are being held back or punished or imprisoned for no other reason than their race or ethnicity. It's been that way for hundreds of years here.

This naturally doesn't make discrimination against white people "okay." In an imperfect system, though, correcting our massive racial imbalance means that, unfortunately, a few Frank Ricci types fall through the cracks. But if people like Pat Buchanan would embrace the spirit of correcting the imbalance, we'd be able to fix these cracks.

Ultimately, however, Pat Buchanan is an old white man who is clinging desperately -- and desperately is the appropriate adverb -- to the past, as Rachel pointed out. He fears the inevitable browning of America and so he's lashing out more and more often with this venomous, divisive, hate-mongering language.

The serious question here is whether MSNBC will continue to finance his clearly white supremacist views. If there's anyone in America who doesn't deserve more air time, it's people like Pat Buchanan. They had their time and they failed. Their reign was destructive and a blight on American history. They have no place in the discourse anymore.

Time to step aside, Pat. For the good of the country.

(Cross posted at BobCesca.com)