THEY HAVE A DREAM

I see from a series of posts at The American Spectator's blog that some right-wingers want to move around a couple of our holidays -- for the most high-minded of reasons, of course.

John Tabin yesterday:

RealClearPolitics reprints the I Have a Dream speech. The speech was given on August 28, which (as Steve Sailer has repeatedly argued) might work better than his January birthday as a date to remember Dr. King. Let's face it, at this point we're all kind of holiday'd out, while in August we haven't had a day off since July 4th.

Philip Klein an hour and a half later:

But were it on August 28 John, it would be too close to Labor Day.

Tabin a few minutes after that:

Philip: Sailer has proposed a four-day Labor Day weekend, seeing as no one gets much work done that Friday anyway. Another alternative would be to scrap Labor Day, the only federal holiday established in honor of a special interest group. (Veterans Day started as a WWI Armistice celebration, so it doesn't count.)

Isn't that thoughful? We're all "holiday'd out" in January, and the best possible solution really is to eliminate the stand-alone holiday commemorating the life of Dr. King and just shove King's day onto another holiday. Not out of disrepect or anything, of course -- heavens, no!

Or perhaps we should just completely get rid of Labor Day, "the only federal holiday established in honor of a special interest group" -- you know, people who have to work for a living.

And yes, many of you recognize Steve Sailer as the neo-white supremacist defender of eugenics whose work was cited in David Brooks's notorious "natalism" column a couple of years ago. Here's Sailer's essay on MLK Day -- and his admiration for King really knows no bounds:

The truth is that King advocated "compensatory" hiring of blacks. Overall, he was a conventional Sixties Socialist. He subscribed to most of the leftist nostrums that did so much damage to blacks -- above all, boosting welfare payments to single mothers (the black illegitimacy rate is three times worse today than in the mid-1960s) and going soft on crime (despite the Sixties' crime wave and baby boom, the number of inmates fell from 212,000 in 1960 to 196,000 in 1970).

Ah, but he was a driving force in bringing about the end of Jim Crow, which, to Sailer, was a fine thing -- not because it was a necessary response to a monstrous injustice, but because it helped boost the economy of the South. That's what really matters, right?