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You truly exemplify the hear no evil, see no evil brand of conservatism. I suppose the fact that Hoover violated the constitutional rights of thousands using the illegal cointelpro program that I previously discussed at length, allowed his agents to harass, illegally wiretap, and engage in extortion are just small things that distract from Hoover’s “greatness”. It is sad you don’t see Hoover criminality for what it was.

No, Mr Y, we don t both agree that Mr Hoover was a bad, bad guy. One of us believes that he was an effective and efficient law enforcement leader.

Then one of you is on crack, and it ain t Mr. Y. Hoover was a thug who was dressing up like a lady while fluffing his own legacy and violating people s civil rights.

Sorry, Mr Willis, but Director Hoover built a fine, professional and effective law enforcement agency, virtually from scratch. The fact is that the FBI did defend us against Nazi saboteurs and Soviet spies as well as “regular” crime. If Mr Hoover’s personal life was suspect (and I wonder how much of that is just urban legend), it didn’t seem to make any difference in his effectiveness as a law enforcement officer.

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I concur completely with your post. Well said as usual.

From The Final Report of the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities- April 26, 1976:

 All of these activities, as well as the FBI’s use of electronic surveillance without a substantial national security predicate, also infringed the rights of countless Americans under the Fourth Amendment protection “against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

 The abusive techniques used by the FBI in COINTELPRO from 1956 to 1971 included violations of both federal and state statutes prohibiting mail fraud, wire fraud, incitement to violence, sending obscene material through the mail, and extortion. More fundamentally, the harassment of innocent citizens engaged in lawful forms of political expression did serious injury to the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech and the right of the people to assemble peaceably and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. The Bureau’s maintenance of the Security Index, which targeted thousands of American citizens for detention in the event of national emergency, clearly overstepped the permissible bounds established by Congress in the Emergency Detention Act of 1950 and represented, in contravention of the Act, a potential general suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus secured by Article 1, Section 9, of the Constitution.

 A distressing number of the programs and techniques developed by the intelligence community involved transgressions against human decency that were no less serious than any technical violations of law. Some of the most fundamental values of this society were threatened by activities such as the smear campaign against Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the testing of dangerous drugs on unsuspecting American citizens, the dissemination of information about the sex lives, drinking habits, and marital problems of electronic surveillance targets, and the COINTELPRO attempts to turn dissident organizations against one another and to destroy marriages.

This is what President Jimmy Carter referenced in his remarks at Mrs. King s Homegoing Celebration. The truth hurts conservatives. It unmasks their motives and deflates their religiosity and pomposity. It should be the weapon of choice for committed Liberals of all persuasions.

Mrs. King led a political life dealing with the most vexing issues of her time. To reference her struggles and the attacks she endured by our government in the name of all of the people is not only right, its mandatory to put these inflammatory incidents in the proper context of her crusading struggle for justice.

I thought it was conservatives who were always seeing things in black and white?

While I will not defend anything Hoover did with regard to his paranoia when the world was changing around him and what he called ‘subversives’, Hoover did revolutionize the FBI and turned it into a premier law enforcement agency. Thanks to his leadership, the FBI was able to apprehend and foil attacks by Nazi agents that were sent to the US to commit acts of sabotage on our soil. So it’s a little silly to just write him off as a “thug.” Oh and don’t lecture me about getting things wrong when you’re citing urband legends as fact.

Now that I’ve finally caught on to your ironic reference to the “bang up job” done after Floyd, please enlighten me further.

What were the complaints of North Carolina residents about FEMA’s response?

Oh come on! Can’t you be intellectually honest enough to say that it was Bobby Kennedy who approved wiretapping MLK?

I think we both agree that J. Edgar Hoover was a bad, bad guy. It was, however, the Conservatives who were calling King a Communist, a seditionist, a rabble rouser, etc. In fact, you can still find them on Free Republic.com.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/829049/posts

Jay C: if you want to talk comparative racial politics in the sixties, liberals come out way, way ahead of conservatives on the issues. I’ll be the first to castigate Kennedy and Johnson for wiretapping King, clearly (as though Nixon wouldn’t have), but they got the Civil Rights bill passed, and split their own party to do it. You only bring up RFK to distract from your ideology’s hideously destructive racial past.

 Well, it wasn t the Republicans who were bugging Dr King s telephone.

I think we both agree that J. Edgar Hoover was a bad, bad guy. It was, however, the Conservatives who were calling King a Communist, a seditionist, a rabble rouser, etc. In fact, you can still find them on Free Republic.com.

No, Mr Y, we don’t both agree that Mr Hoover was a bad, bad guy. One of us believes that he was an effective and efficient law enforcement leader.

It was the conservatives of the day, most of whom are now dead and buried, who called Dr King a Communist, a seditionist and a rabble rouser. Their argument died with them, and very few people say that about Dr King today; I’m as conservative as you’ll find, and I don’t say that.

But if J Edgar Hoover’s FBI was spying on Dr King, it was at the behest of President Lyndon Johnson (a Democrat) and Attorney General Robert Kennedy (another Democrat), both of whom were considered liberals in their day.

Funny, but nobody had a problem with the Bush/Brownie way prior to Katrina. Oh and ask victims of Hurricane Floyd, especially those in North Carolona about the bang up job FEMA did after Floyd swept through.

Floyd wasn’t under Brownie. It was under James Lee Witt. You’re playing, “But what about Clinton?” again.

Yes, keep pretending that MLK and his wife were cute little civil rights icons who were beloved by conservatives.

Well, it wasn’t the Republicans who were bugging Dr King’s telephone.

Whatever you may think about President Bush, he was at the funeral to pay his respects to Mrs King. Why is that a difficult concept? What part of “paying respect” don’t y’all understand?”