Perhaps the most offensive thing in Bush's SOTU...

... was his appropriation of MLK's legacy to advance his own war-mongering. I'm willing to overlook the paean to Coretta Scott King at the beginning. Any president would have had to begin that way.

But take a look at the end of the speech here:

Fellow citizens, we have been called to leadership in a period of consequence. We have entered a great ideological conflict we did nothing to invite. We see great changes in science and commerce that will influence all our lives. And sometimes it can seem that history is turning in a wide arc, toward an unknown shore.

Yet the destination of history is determined by human action, and every great movement of history comes to a point of choosing. Lincoln could have accepted peace at the cost of disunity and continued slavery. Martin Luther King could have stopped at Birmingham or at Selma and achieved only half a victory over segregation. The United States could have accepted the permanent division of Europe and been complicit in the oppression of others. Today, having come far in our own historical journey, we must decide: Will we turn back, or finish well?

Before history is written down in books, it is written in courage. Like Americans before us, we will show that courage, and we will finish well. We will lead freedom's advance. We will compete and excel in the global economy. We will renew the defining moral commitments of this land. And so we move forward, optimistic about our country, faithful to its cause, and confident of the victories to come.

So he essentially is saying that the legacy of MLK -- a man committed to nonviolence who spent the last years of his life speaking out against the Vietnam war -- is somehow "honored" by rejecting calls for withdrawal from our present-day Vietnam, Iraq.

The line about "And sometimes it can seem that history is turning in a wide arc, toward an unknown shore" even echoes King's line about "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.''

So Bush wants to continue fighting this war in Iraq. Though you can never say for certain where he would have stood on this issue, consider what King said:

"Testimony of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr." Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1966.

It is a question of the allocation of money, which means the establishing of priorities.

Instead of joyfully committing ourselves to the war on poverty, a grudging parsimonious allocation of resources is measured out as if we feared to overkill. In contrast, the exploration of space engages not only our enthusiasm but our patriotism. Developing it as a global race, we have intensified its inherent drama and brought its adventure into every living room, nursery, shop and office. No such fervor nor exhilaration attends the war on poverty. There is impatience with its problems, indifference toward its progress, and pronounced hostility toward its errors. Without denying the value of scientific endeavor, there is a striking absurdity in committing billions to reach the moon where no people live, and from which non presently can benefit, while the densely populated slums are allocated miniscule appropriations. With the continuation of these strange values in a few years we can be assured that we will set a man on the moon and with an adequate telescope he will be able to see the slum on earth with their intensified congestion, decay, and turbulence. On what scale of values is this a program of progress?

THE WASTE OF WAR

In still another area the expenditure of resources knows no restraints -- here, our abundance is fully recognized and enthusiastically squandered. This is the waste of war. While the antipoverty program is cautiously initiated, zealously supervised, and evaluated for immediate results, billions are liberally expended for ill-considered warfare. The recently revealed misestimate of the war budget amounts to $10 billion for a single year. The error alone is more than five times the amount committed to antipoverty programs.

The security we profess to seek in foreign adventures, we will lose in our decaying cities. The bombs in Vietnam explode at home -- they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
By Rev. Martin Luther King 4 April 1967
Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It wassending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.

[...]

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

[...]

I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries. They must see Americans as strange liberators.

[...]

When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

[...]

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Does anyone really think he would support Bush's illegal war of choice against Iraq? Does anyone think that the decision of King to struggle on for civil rights after Selma is equatable to Bush's refusal to admit we've already lost in Iraq and waste another few 100 (1,000?) American lives there?

Add to the outrage the fact that this president is slowly but certainly eroding the very civil rights King struggled for. Specifically, Bush's political appointees at DOJ consistently overruled staff attorneys on whether states like GA and TX have been violating the voting rights of minorities.

Politics Alleged In Voting Cases
Justice Officials Are Accused of Influence
By Dan Eggen, Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 23, 2006; Page A01

The Justice Department's voting section, a small and usually obscure unit that enforces the Voting Rights Act and other federal election laws, has been thrust into the center of a growing debate over recent departures and controversial decisions in the Civil Rights Division as a whole.

Many current and former lawyers in the section charge that senior officials have exerted undue political influence in many of the sensitive voting-rights cases the unit handles. Most of the department's major voting-related actions over the past five years have been beneficial to the GOP, they say, including two in Georgia, one in Mississippi and a Texas redistricting plan orchestrated by Rep. Tom DeLay (R) in 2003.

And, finally consider, this new (though unsurprising) report:

Study Ties Political Leanings to Hidden Biases
By Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 30, 2006; Page A05

Another study presented at the conference, which was in Palm Springs, Calif., explored relationships between racial bias and political affiliation by analyzing self-reported beliefs, voting patterns and the results of psychological tests that measure implicit attitudes -- subtle stereotypes people hold about various groups.

That study found that supporters of President Bush and other conservatives had stronger self-admitted and implicit biases against blacks than liberals did.

[...]

The analysis found that substantial majorities of Americans, liberals and conservatives, found it more difficult to associate black faces with positive concepts than white faces -- evidence of implicit bias. But districts that registered higher levels of bias systematically produced more votes for Bush.

"Obviously, such research does not speak at all to the question of the prejudice level of the president," said Banaji, "but it does show that George W. Bush is appealing as a leader to those Americans who harbor greater anti-black prejudice."

[...]

"If anyone in Washington is skeptical about these findings, they are in denial," he said. "We have 50 years of evidence that racial prejudice predicts voting. Republicans are supported by whites with prejudice against blacks. If people say, 'This takes me aback,' they are ignoring a huge volume of research."