No No No - Just Stop, Please.

I know it's not a new thing to try and appropriate historical luminaries into arguments, but this is really beyond the pale (via).

If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, would he understand why the United States is at war?

Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department's general counsel, posed that question at today's Pentagon commemoration of King's legacy.

Johnson's answer, of course, is that MLK would be hunky dory with it, as counter intuitive as that might be (and contrary to what MLK actually said).  But if that wasn't bad enough, he tries to reason that:

if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack . . .

Note that he's saying this about a man who was perceived by many in the United States at the time as the period equivalent of a terrorist - a Communist - including by the Government! All that FBI surveillance of him wasn't so the Feds could make sure the historical record was complete, you know.

Look, we get it. We're bogged down in an unpopular and probably unwinnable war that has only been ratcheted up over the past couple of years (Nobel Peace Prizes notwithstanding). You need some PR boosts. Just do it on your own, OK? Don't rob the dead of their integrity while demonstrating that you have none of your own.