Wow....what a revelation? Of course Obama is no King, neither was GW Bush, Neither was Bill Clinton, neither was HW Bush neither was Reagan and all other presidents who have come since King.

We are not trying to recreate a King here, what the world is looking at Obama to do is take on the challenges of today and now. King tackled the challenges of the 50's and 60's which were much more demanding than those that face us now. The sixties required a greater personality.....What we need now is a different type of leadership that is not onlt bringing people together but also delaing with a mortgage crisis and a world crisis in the form of the Iraq war.

I am not sure that MLK would have stood by and supported the Iraq war, however based on what he was facing at home I am sure that the Iraq war would not have been his primary focus just as Vietnam was not.

It pains me when we compare our current leaders to, Winston Churchill (GW Bush), Lincoln, George Washington, FDR or even Ronald Reagan. The challenges that we face now will define the leadership we need now. King or for that matter Churchill in the current scenario facing a mortgage crises as the prevailing challenge of the day, could or may have failed to succeed in overcoming them. However when faced with segregation or the second world war they were more than well primed to tackle those issues.

How you have managed to wrap in Jeremiah Wright I am not sure, however If I judged George washington by the slaves he kept, then surely he would lose a lot of esteem in my eyes. What I am stating here is that we cannot judge the core of character based upon our fleeting knowledge of their associations.

This is basically just a rehash of your previous hack job, Christopher..

It's been a while since the booze would lighten him up.

read again esp. the last part of the article.

CH bemoans the decay of the once very intellectual civil rights movement. Instead of socially progressive serious political activists you have babbling nationalists and religious wackos dominating the discourse with their crackpot theories and separatism, that is where J. Wright, Sharpton or Farrakhan are "wrapped in".

MLK and his comrades were serious political activist formulating obtainable goals. MLK with religious rethoric but essentially secular ("humanist"). Obama creates soundbites that echo this rhetoric, but fails to provide anything concrete. On the contrary, his association with figures like Wright gives the impression that this kind of cynical demagogues are part of the solution not the problem.

CH gave a nice link to the page about B.Rustin, at the end of this article you find some articles by this great man. (http://www.socialdemocrats.or­g/brindex.html)

Read Rustins "FROM PROTEST TO POLITICS" and "THE BLACKS AND THE UNIONS" as well as his debate with Malcom X. Than you might realise that there is an essential political advancement lost. If I should believe that Barack Obama will do real change, than I want to see him going beyond the achievements of MLK and the CRM, proposing concrete measures and plans and mobilising people for it, not regressing into demagogy and meaningless empty phrases to get himself elected by dumb white people and black nationalists.

@ Set Mi Free:

"I am not sure that MLK would have stood by and supported the Iraq war, however based on what he was facing at home I am sure that the Iraq war would not have been his primary focus just as Vietnam was not."

Rev. Martin Luther King was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War. In fact, MLK's rhetoric on the Vietnam War was, for its time, as incendiary as Rev. Jeremiah Wright's rhetoric on the Iraq War. This earned Rev. King the special attention of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.

Obama 08!