That such an event could happen merely four years after the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, N.J., where the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was denied recognition in favor of the Mississippi delegates who were chosen via a system that prevented blacks from voting, is a mark of how far and how fast the civil rights movement had come. That it could be so little noticed is a measure of how quickly the movement was being eclipsed by Vietnam.

Fannie Lou Hamer — who had led the charge for the MFDP in 1964, testifying before the credentials committee about the violence faced by blacks who tried to register to vote, and then dismissing the compromise the party offered the MFDP with “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats” — was a living presence at a convention that, for all the turmoil both inside and outside the hall, was haunted by ghosts. Absent was Lyndon Baines Johnson, who in 1964 had found Hamer’s televised testimony so damning of the Southern Democrats he needed to gain the party’s nomination that he convened a press conference to knock her off the air. Five months earlier, depressed by the growing reaction against the Vietnam War, convinced the war was unwinnable but unable and unwilling to extricate himself from it, Johnson announced his decision not to seek reelection. A few days after that, Martin Luther King Jr., who believed that LBJ’s removal would pave the way for the end of American involvement in Vietnam, was shot to death in Memphis, Tenn. Two months later, the candidate whom many, including King, expected to bring the troops home, Robert F. Kennedy, was murdered in Los Angeles.

And yet the heartbreaking trajectory that Kotz details in his rich and necessary book suggests that even if King and Kennedy had lived, even if Johnson had been the Democratic candidate in 1968, the civil rights movement still would have frayed irreparably.

The hope and fervor and uplift that accompanied the end of legal segregation in the South began to dim when it became clear that segregation’s demise had barely begun to address the resentment that centuries of oppression had left behind, or the poverty suffered by blacks throughout the country. Hard on the heels of the 1965 Voting Rights Act came the Watts riots, an event that shocked both LBJ and King because it expressed that for many black Americans, the new laws had changed nothing. The Poor People’s Campaign, a six-week protest held in the early spring of 1968 in Washington to highlight poverty, had fizzled, failing to equal the impact of the 1963 March on Washington or 1964′s Freedom Summer or the campaigns in Birmingham and Selma, Ala. And the emergence of Black Power proponents (typified by Stokely Carmichael, then head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) changed the tone and inclusiveness of the movement.

By 1968, civil rights had ceded to Vietnam as the most urgent issue in American political life. King had recognized earlier than most the link between civil rights and Vietnam. Despite Johnson’s insistence that America could have both guns and butter, King knew that the Congress could not fund both the antipoverty and education programs of LBJ’s Great Society and a war. And the disproportionate numbers of blacks and poor who were drafted was as insidious a practice of institutionalized racism as any that had been defeated by legislation.

The connection between civil rights and Vietnam was denied by those who criticized King for speaking out against the war, many of them his past supporters. A New York Times editorial called the two issues “distinct and separate,” while the Washington Post referred to the linkage as “sheer inventions of unsupported fantasy.” King was right to see the moral and economic consistency in working to end poverty and opposing Vietnam. But his critics in the civil rights movement — among them Whitney Young of the Urban League, and the NAACP board of directors who unanimously voted to condemn King — were not wrong to believe that focusing on Vietnam would inevitably mean taking America’s attention off civil rights. That shift of focus coincided with an unspoken sense of weariness on the part of whites who, though only some said so out loud, wondered, after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Act and Johnson’s War on Poverty, “What more do blacks want?”

It was a question that could be an expression of outright racism; of naiveti about how much it would take to better the lot of black Americans; of a patronizing expectation that blacks should be grateful for the recognition of rights that never should have been denied, and resentment that their fawning gratitude never came. It was a question that even Lyndon Johnson asked. Johnson acknowledged the destructive legacy of racism, as in a speech articulating the basis for affirmative action (though it was not called that yet) in which he said, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” But, a man of enormous and fragile ego, he still felt personally betrayed by the Watts riots. “After all we’ve accomplished,” he asked. “How could it be?”

“All we’ve accomplished” was not just a politician’s vanity. One of the great virtues of “Judgment Days” is the case it makes for LBJ as the most liberal American president of the 20th century. That statement will no doubt anger or amuse those who still insist on seeing Johnson’s shameful deceptions regarding Vietnam as the totality of his presidency; those who confuse politics with the priesthood and recoil from Johnson’s pragmatic mastery of political deal-making; or those who wish for all the change that power can effect without understanding that you first have to have the power to effect change.

Near the beginning of “Judgment Days,” Kotz writes of Johnson in the hours following JFK’s assassination, finally retreating to his bed only to sit up until 3 a.m. with a small group of aides. Johnson began talking passionately and determinedly about how he intended to pass the civil rights bill, a voting rights bill, a bill to allow Americans to pay for higher education, and how he was going to realize Harry Truman’s cherished dream of providing healthcare to the elderly. “No president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s,” Kotz writes, “had attempted such a broad assault on social and economic inequality.” Furthermore, Johnson was talking this ambitiously only a few hours after the murder of a beloved president. And he was not dissuaded when, two days later, a poll showed that 70 percent of Americans did not believe he could govern as well as JFK.

Liberals were suspicious of Johnson’s record of voting with the segregationist Dixiecrats on every civil rights bill that came before him during his time in the House and the Senate. But as much of a burden as the presidency came to be to Lyndon Johnson, it was also his liberation as a politician. Having attained the highest office in the land (and not sure he would be able keep it come November ’64) Johnson began acting like the politician he always dreamed he could be.

This was a man who had been an ardent New Dealer. Johnson had shepherded the rural electrification bill that brought electricity to the Texas hill country where he grew up. He had seen the effects of poverty on the poor Mexican students he had taught during his time as a schoolteacher. And, as Robert Dallek reported in the first volume of his LBJ biography, “Lone Star Rising,” after visiting Germany in the ’30s, Johnson arranged passage to Mexico for Jews, who were then smuggled into Texas job-training camps that Johnson had helped set up to aid his constituents in finding work during the Depression. At the opening of a Houston synagogue in 1968 where LBJ and Lady Bird were the guests of honor, members of the congregation approached Mrs. Johnson to tell her they’d be dead if it hadn’t been for her husband.

Of course there were political considerations behind Johnson’s socially progressive legislation. Always concerned about his place in history, Johnson wanted to prove himself worthy of the liberal legacy of JFK.

What should long ago have become a plain fact of American history but remains hostage to political myth is that LBJ dwarfed JFK as a president. Johnson’s vision, his willingness to cast civil rights and the war on poverty as moral issues, his shrewd use of the power of the presidency to ensure the passage of his bills, makes Kennedy’s timid, halfhearted gestures toward civil rights seem puny in comparison.

For Kennedy, civil rights had the inescapable air of noblesse oblige, something that he would get around to when he deemed the moment was right, expecting blacks to be patient meanwhile. Civil rights neither engaged his sympathies nor resonated with his experience the way it did with Johnson’s. For Johnson, civil rights was the cornerstone to realizing his gargantuan and romantic vision of the presidency. Wanting to, as he said, “out-Roosevelt Roosevelt” and “out-Lincoln Lincoln,” Johnson attempted nothing less than to end the Civil War by enshrining the New Deal as the highest legislative expression of American principles.

Two quotes from Kotz’s book suggest the breadth of Johnson’s vision and the timidity that characterized Kennedy’s presidency. On May 30, 1963, Johnson made the hundredth Memorial Day speech on the battlefield at Gettysburg. He spoke with more bluntness, eloquence and urgency about the plight of American blacks than any president had to that time. “One hundred years ago,” Johnson began, “the slave was freed. One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin. Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unaware of the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact. The Negro today asks justice.” Then, rebuking those who, like Kennedy, feared that civil rights must not proceed too fast, Johnson said, “We do not answer him — we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil — when we answer ‘Patience’.”

Contrast Johnson’s simple realization of the necessity of swift and decisive action with a comment made by Bobby Kennedy, then the attorney general in his brother’s administration, that Johnson’s advocacy was coming “when it was not useful.” What the attorney general meant was that he feared Johnson was harming JFK’s reelection chances in Southern states. But his words need to be examined. How is it possible for the highest law enforcement officer in the land to envision any time when it is “not useful” for American citizens to be accorded their constitutional rights?

As others, like King biographer Taylor Branch, have done, Kotz makes a steady, consistent, irrefutable case for all the ways in which JFK lagged on civil rights, even to the point of allowing the bill he introduced in June 1963 to languish as it became clear he would face Goldwater in 1964. But those facts have done little to diminish the seemingly unassailable myth of JFK as the great friend to civil rights. Part of that, of course, is a sentimental attachment to a man who died so horribly so young. Much is due to feelings that are not so defensible.

Even before JFK’s assassination, people treated LBJ, as they have other white Southerners from Elvis Presley to Bill Clinton, with a finicky WASPish disdain for what they perceived as vulgar. Reporter David Broder’s infamous comment about Bill Clinton in Washington, “He came in and trashed the place, and it’s not his place,” is the most blatant example of that attitude, a way of talking about white Southerners as if they were hillbillies who put their feet on the furniture. Broder’s message was clear: Those people have no place in our country.

Whatever their differences, this was not an attitude King held toward LBJ. Kotz reports that before King’s first meeting with Johnson, King’s advisor Clarence Jones told him, “You’ve got more in common with Lyndon Johnson than you do with John F. Kennedy or with me. White and black people in the South share the same culture — food, music, religions, speech. You need to talk with him like no one else can.” King himself later said he was happy there was a “fellow Southerner” in the White House concerned about civil rights.

What I’m getting at is that, legitimate grievances with LBJ’s politics, his ego, his crudeness, his mendacity and scheming aside, there has always been something inescapably patrician and white in the contempt for LBJ. Ralph Ellison wrote of this in his 1965 essay “The Myth of the Flawed White Southerner.” “No one,” said Ellison, “has initiated more legislation for education, for health, for racial justice, for the arts, for urban reform than he. Currently it is the fashion of many intellectuals to ignore these accomplishments and promises of a broader freedom to come, but if those of other backgrounds and interests [emphasis added] can afford to be blind to their existence, my own interests and background compel me to bear witness.” Contrast that with Mary McCarthy, recalling, in 1974, hearing the news six years earlier that Johnson was not seeking reelection. McCarthy and colleagues were in a Hanoi hotel room listening to Johnson’s speech on Armed Forces Radio and reports “dancing, kissing, hugging each other … I felt a dazed pride myself. We had helped to bring the war to an end.” McCarthy immediately acknowledges the naiveti of that belief. And no one in March ’68 could have foreseen the hell of the next five months that would give rise to Richard Nixon’s election in November.

But even without Cassandra-like foresight, McCarthy, belonging to one of the “other backgrounds and interests” of which Ellison wrote, perceived LBJ’s presidency with striking narrowness. It was not white intellectuals like Mary McCarthy who had benefited most from LBJ’s presidency. And it would not be white intellectuals who would suffer most when not only the war continued but civil rights were rolled back at home under the law-and-order ethos of the Nixon years. (Ellison ended his essay by saying, “President Johnson will have to settle for being recognized as the greatest American president for the poor and for Negroes, but this, as I see it,” he added with an implicit chiding of those whose vision was less expansive than his, “is a very great honor indeed.”)

None of this excuses the very real harm LBJ did. His passion for civil rights stands side by side with his allowing FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to direct a massive smear campaign against King. Hoover went so far as to violate FBI policy by deciding not to inform King of threats against his life, and even mailing to his home an audiotape, made from wiretaps, of King’s extramarital affairs with a note suggesting that King kill himself to keep the tape from becoming public. Kotz details how LBJ aide Bill Moyers gave FBI agent Cartha “Deke” DeLoach the go-ahead to disseminate the bureau’s surveillance on King. (Kotz tells of an FBI agent trying to persuade Atlanta Constitution editor Eugene Patterson to publish a story of King’s affairs. Patterson refused, telling the agent, “What you’re doing is the story … the federal police force of the United States doing this to an individual citizen.” Does anyone believe an editor today would show that discretion?)

Kotz writes of how much LBJ feared Hoover’s power. He does not excuse Johnson for giving that thug so much leeway, but he doesn’t make the mistake so many have made with Johnson and take that as the whole of the man.

Kotz tells the story of the relationship between Johnson and King as a tale of the tenuous marriage of idealism and pragmatism. It’s to Kotz’s credit that he does not depict it as an either/or choice. Which is what makes his section on the 1964 Democratic Convention and the MFDP so irresolvable. You feel how disgusted the MFDP and its supporters were at the prospect of seating a delegation controlled by the Mississippi Democratic Party, a power structure that intimidated blacks and protected the murderers of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Cheney, and the killers of many others. At the same time, there is no doubt what a catastrophe a walkout on the part of the Mississippi delegation would have been: It would have triggered a walkout by other Southern delegates and seriously weakening LBJ’s chance of reelection. So the unquestionable morality of seating the MFDP butts heads with this chilling potentiality: President Goldwater.

I came to “Judgment Days” wondering what there was left to say about this subject and these two men after Dallek’s “Lone Star Rising,” after the two volumes already published of Taylor Branch’s trilogy “America in the King Years,” after the documentary “Eyes on the Prize.” I should have realized that, like World War II, the civil rights era is a seemingly inexhaustible storehouse of narrative, and like World War II, an era in which America had to decide whether it was willing to live up to its stated principles.

Specifically, by keeping his focus on the relationship between Johnson and King in the years from 1963 to 1968, Kotz has allowed us to see the struggle of each to balance idealism and pragmatism. He may focus more on Johnson than King (as I have), but Johnson is a figure whose achievements are less acknowledged than they should be. And Kotz has found an ineluctable sadness in both men. Kotz writes on the insecurities of Johnson and King with what you might call empathetic bafflement. King, perpetually weary from an exhausting schedule and with a mournful fatalism toward the martyrdom he expected at any moment, and LBJ, as ruthless and effective a politician as America has ever produced, but also one who wanted the public’s love and knew he would not have it, who was not even satisfied with his crushing defeat of Goldwater (he wanted to know how anyone could have voted for his opponent) — each of them were contradictions. But both were visionaries convinced of the morality of their cause and racked by constant, nagging self-doubt. Committed to civil rights, they were shadowed by Vietnam, a stalking ghost through the story of “Judgment Days,” ready to swallow it whole. It is a measure of their mutual achievement and of their personal sadness that you put down “Judgment Days” believing them, on some essential, irreducible level, brothers under the skin.

— Editor’s note: This story has been corrected since its original publication. —

First, the messy details, quickly. Sometime Monday parts or all of the following “quote” flew around Twitter and Facebook, attributed to King:

I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

Then someone Googled the first sentence, and found King never said it. The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle went up with a “gotcha” post, accusing folks with reservations about both bin Laden’s killing and its celebration with fabricating evidence that King would have agreed with them. But then it came out that, while King didn’t say the first sentence, he had in fact made the other two statements, on Page 53 of his book “Strength to Love.” And it turned out nobody “fabricated” anything: A 24-year-old teacher named Jessica Dovey wrote her own thoughts, sans quote marks, before the King quote, and posted it on Facebook, but as the post was cut and pasted and abbreviated in countless ways, King’s words and Dovey’s got jumbled. No fabrication; no harm, no foul.

But the frenzy over the King quote came along with a disturbing wave of thought-policing, from all over the political spectrum, and they seem to be related. Battles raged Monday not so much over whether the U.S. killing Osama was morally or legally justified, but over the right way to feel about it, and the right way to express those feelings (which seemed to be the core issue the King “quote” was addressing). Has social media made us a nation of biddies, chiding everyone over the “appropriate” way to feel about public events? David Sirota’s Salon piece, “‘USA! USA!’ is the wrong response,” was widely attacked. Maybe I should count Sirota among the feelings-police, but he made a valid political argument, and he came in for an avalanche of criticism merely for suggesting sobriety, not celebration, was the right response to bin Laden’s death. It was somehow read as Sirota criticizing Obama’s decision, which he did not. (It was also posted more than 100,000 times on Facebook, so a lot of people also agreed with Sirota.) Can one both believe that the killing was the right thing to do, and also be sober, even sad about it? Yes, you can, but in some quarters, anything less than high-fiving the president’s “victory” was suspect.

I witnessed a similar Facebook and Twitter frenzy last week when President Obama released his long-form birth certificate. I wrote on Twitter, Facebook and my blog that I was “sad” the idiotic birther controversy had come to that. Within moments tweets were flying — I’m beginning to conflate Twitter with Angry Birds, given all my Twitter trouble lately — accusing me of finding fault with Obama’s decision to release the long-form document. I expressly wrestled with the good-or-bad move question in my blog post; and I came down ambivalent. But I was not ambivalent about my sadness the president had been forced to prove his legitimacy to the likes of Donald Trump. People can feel otherwise, but why attack me for a heartfelt response to an insult to the president?

As I wrote on Sunday night, I personally had a hard time seeing bin Laden’s death as something to celebrate, but I didn’t judge those who did. The 9/11 attacks were of such enormity, rippling out to reach so many people in such different ways, we’re all entitled to our subjective reactions; it was everyone’s tragedy, and everyone grieves differently. Ultimately, I’m with Mona Eltahawy, in feeling like I could have done without the drunken “frat-boy” air of some of the partying; but for all I know, someone I see as a drunken frat boy might have lost his mother in the towers, or on one of the doomed planes.

I think we’re seeing the rise of the Feeling Police because in a time of profound social dislocation, a lot of people aren’t sure what they believe about right or wrong, justice or injustice, and they’re not sure whom they trust to give them information and guidance about it. It might be the New York Times; it might also be some witty guy on Twitter; it might be Penn Jillette on Facebook; at its best it’s a moral and political figure like Martin Luther King Jr.

But we can’t outsource our own moral or political values to Dr. King. We also can’t ask President Obama to be Dr. King. I realized years ago that was part of my own problem with Obama being a mere mortal politician, making compromises whether on healthcare reform or government spying. He’s a gifted politician who seems to have a strong moral core, but he’s a politician; and now he’s commander in chief. I can’t expect him to be the prophetic, perfect visionary we white liberals have needed our black leaders to be. Also: You can believe fervently in the power of King’s words about love, and hate, and violence — as I do — and still accept that President Obama did the right thing, based on the knowledge he had before him.

And for now, I do. That doesn’t mean I won’t avidly consume every new account of the operation that led to bin Laden’s killing. If some of the information behind it was acquired through torture or other “extra-legal” means, I want to know that. I may come to believe the president made the wrong decision, but I don’t think that, given what I know.

Back to feelings for a bit: We can’t help focusing on feelings, in the absence of hard information. We’re social animals; we trust our “feelings” to tell us something real. So I had very intense feelings looking at the now iconic picture White House photographer Pete Souza snapped of the president and his team as they “watched” the bin Laden operation in the Situation Room Sunday night. (There’s no hard information about what they were actually watching.) You’ve seen it. It’s riveting. Hillary Clinton is beyond anguished; her hand is over her mouth, her eyes red-rimmed. The only person looking as grim is the president himself; he’s slumped in his chair, looking hard at the screen. Vice President Joe Biden looked stricken; the New York Times reported that he was fingering rosary beads. The military leaders in the room were more granite-faced, but I was reassured to see our civilian leaders grimacing at the reality of killing bin Laden and his family members – even if they’d make the same decision tomorrow. Their “feelings” — at least what appear to be their feelings — reassure me they approached the decision with the moral gravity it deserved.

If Hillary Clinton had been pumping her fist and yelling “USA, USA!” after the killing I’d have been aghast, and said so. The range of “appropriate” feelings — and the way you telegraph them — is more clear-cut when you’re talking about our leaders. Being reassured by seeing their feelings, while we wait for information, makes sense. But ultimately we need, as citizens, to decide if we believe this was a just decision, a moral decision and a decision that made the U.S. safer (which may add up to three different things.) We can’t simply outsource that judgment, whether to King, Obama or our favorite pundits. Wasting time adjudicating whether people are expressing the right reaction in the right way is a silly distraction.

“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”

The first person to cite it on Twitter was the famous magician/Libertarian Penn Jillette, but the words quickly went viral, and the source got lost in the shuffle. The only problem? As Megan McArdle pointed out in the Atlantic, Martin Luther King never said that.  Actually, the quote from MLK about enemies is:

“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

How did this other quote get misattributed to King? As McArdle says in her piece, “It’s a bit too a propos. What ‘thousands’ would King have been talking about? In which enemy’s death was he supposed to be rejoicing?” She also wonders, “Why? What do you get out of saying something pithy, and getting no credit for it?”

Penn admits to being the originator of the quote on Twitter, though he claims it got messed up when he cut and pasted from a longer piece by King. I’m not sure if I believe him; I have a strong suspicion Penn just made it up in order to see how many people would blindly follow along and quote it as fact, without ever checking on the sources. [Jillette has since explained the quote further to Salon (see below), stating that it was an honest mistake.] After all, this is the guy who created the documentary “Penn and Teller: Bullshit!” and the subsequent Showtime series about how easy it was to dupe people.

Update: The source of the quote is a Facebook message by Jessica Dovey, where she goes on to quote Martin Luther King Jr. In this context, it’s easy to see how a cut-and-paste job could have accidentally attributed the source to King. Congrats to Jessica, whose Facebook wall post is one of the more famous sayings on the Internet today. Salon has reached out to Penn Jillette for comment, but has yet to receive a response. (See update below.)

Update 2: On Tuesday afternoon, Penn replied to Salon by email, detailing how he made an “honest mistake,” and conveying his dismay over the suggestion that he would purposefully fabricate a quote from Martin Luther King.

“I made a mistake,” Penn wrote, “I read the quote, thought it was too perfect, checked part of it from the MLK book and then cut and pasted it. The part I checked was not the part that was wrong, and I posted it. A stupid, but honest mistake. When someone pointed out the mistake, I apologized as best I could in the limited number of characters. And then I apologized and explained a few more times.”

Penn also stressed his sadness that the mistake on Twitter apparently led some people to think he was disrespecting Dr. King. “It hurts me to have people think I disrespected Martin Luther King,” he wrote.

Now, the Clarion-Ledger is spotlighting a separate part of the profile, in which Barbour claims he saw Martin Luther King speak in town in 1962, with both whites and blacks in attendance. The newspaper has done searches of various archives and found no evidence that King came to Yazoo City in 1962.

Here’s what Barbour told the Standard:

“I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”

…

I asked what King had said that day.

“I don’t really remember. The truth is, we couldn’t hear very well. We were sort of out there on the periphery. We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do. We paid more attention to the girls than to King.”

King did appear in Yazoo City in 1966 — in the wake of the killing shooting* of civil rights activist James Meredith — but that was a year after Barbour graduated high school, and four years after Barbour said he saw King.

Here’s the Clarion-Ledger’s fact-check:

A search of the King Papers at the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute and the papers of David Garrow, author of the definitive biography on King, Bearing the Cross, failed to find evidence King spoke in Yazoo City in 1962.

The paper couldn’t find anyone who remembered a King visit in ’62.

I also spoke with Garrow, who is the author of the definitive King biography, “Bearing the Cross.” Garrow pointed out that King was in the Mississippi Delta region in February 1962, and he stopped at several towns. However, Garrow’s papers do not indicate that Yazoo City was one of the stops.

This is hardly the first time the governor has been accused of getting his civil rights history wrong. One of his childhood friends, for example, told me last year that Yazoo City was riven by racial tensions in the 1950s and 60s, despite Barbour’s rosy memories of that era. Meanwhile, Barbour managed to get his name next to “KKK” in newspaper headlines around the country this month after he refused to condemn a proposed Mississippi license plate honoring a founder of the Klan.

The overriding question remains: Will Barbour’s series of missteps on matters of race hurt him in a GOP primary?

* CORRECTION: Meredith was shot but not killed in 1966

That’s why something like Sarah Palin claiming to be a victim of “blood libel” doesn’t raise an eyebrow among the true believers. It’s the myth that keeps the checks rolling in for most right-wingers. The liberals are all-powerful and they oppress us.

It’s especially rich coming from Palin, obviously. The only thing the former governor seems to enjoy more than attacking her political opponents is acting like the entire world is aligned against her and her poor family. A tasteless joke from a late night comedian isn’t simply part of the cost of living a public life, it’s more proof that a cabal of liberal elites is devoted to the relentless persecution of innocent conservative Americans. (Part of the game involves purposefully conflating criticism from media figures with organized political attacks. What, after all, is the true difference between David Letterman and the DNC? They’re all liberals.)

The longtime opponents of what they mockingly termed “the culture of victimhood” now revel in every perceived slight. Republicans accused of unethical behavior make great martyrs.

How bad is the delusion? When they aren’t actually treated like oppressed minorities, they pretend they were. Have you seen the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence’s exhaustive and remarkable “Insurrectionism Timeline”? Allow me to make the much less exhaustive Timeline of incidents in which young right-wingers pretended to have been the victims of political violence, or even “hate crimes.”

Every so often, some young Republican will pretend to have been the victim of a violent hate crime. In 2006, there was Justin Jatkoff, who was supposedly beaten senseless by either black people or “a homosexual rights group” who’d sent him an “odd/threatening” e-mail. (He was actually just beaten up by his friends.)

Later that year, a conservative Mormon college student named Francisco Nava claimed to have received hundreds of death threats for a column attacking Princeton University’s “hookup culture.” He said he feared for his safety. Then he claimed he was brutally attacked by men in stocking caps who beat him with a bottle of Orangina. After he became a conservative cause celebre, the cops got him to admit that he’d invented the threats and the attack.

And then there’s Ashley Todd, College Republican National Committee field representative, who claimed to have been brutally attacked by some liberal black person during the 2008 campaign, because she had a McCain sticker on her car. A “B” — for “Barack” — was even carved into her cheek. As we all remember, the B was backwards, because Todd has “carved” it herself.

When Democrats were complaining of death threats as the healthcare debate raged, then-minority whip Eric Cantor claimed someone shot up his office. Police determined that the bullet that landed inside a window at his campaign office had been fired randomly into the air.

The Tea Partiers, of course, are frequent self-declared victims of brutally unfair media coverage, and in their more feverish fantasies, they are even intimidated by “union thugs.” (Violent, “thuggish” union members are the enforcers of the modern Apartheid-like regime that conservatives are forced to live under.)

Even when Republicans occupied the White House, controlled both houses of Congress, and maintained a working majority on the Supreme Court, they imagined themselves victims of all-powerful liberals.

So on this Martin Luther King Day, please, spare a thought for America’s forgotten minority: Comfortable white conservatives. Especially the ones in academia, Hollywood, and the media.

That Helms was even in the Senate was something of a fluke; the coattails of Richard Nixon, who carried North Carolina by 40 points over George McGovern in 1972, had been the main reason for his eight-point victory in his first campaign. And even in the early ’80s, North Carolina was still filled with culturally conservative white voters who had been trained from birth to support Democrats. One survey showed Hunt, a moderate who was finishing his second term as governor, 22 points ahead of Helms. Another put the margin at 19. Incumbent senators just aren’t supposed to overcome those kinds of deficits.

But those polls were taken before the first week of October ’83, when the bill to create a federal holiday honoring King — which had easily cleared the House over the summer — landed in the Senate. Two of the chamber’s top Republicans, Howard Baker and Bob Dole, embraced it and urged their colleagues to do the same. The GOP had once been the party of civil rights, and they hoped to attract black voters back into the fold — both for the ’84 Senate elections and for the long-term future of their party.

Helms, though, saw a much different opportunity: to give those conservative white voters in his state a reason to buck their partisan heritage and side with their Republican senator in ’84. Thus it was that he declared his intent to filibuster the King holiday, claiming the slain civil rights hero had been a devotee of “action-oriented Marxism” and that the movement he’d led had actually been a haven for Communists.

It didn’t matter that he stood little chance of prevailing in the legislative fight. By the fall of 1983, even Ronald Reagan, like Helms a hero of the New Right (whose political career was probably saved by Helms’ assistance in North Carolina’s 1976 presidential primary), had come around to supporting the idea of a King holiday — or at least to saying that he’d sign the bill if it reached his desk. Previously, Reagan had offered the standard line of King holiday opponents that giving federal workers a new day off would be too expensive. As J. Bennett Johnston, a Democratic senator from Louisiana, explained to the New York Times, “If you took a secret poll, the Senate would not want additional holidays. But the symbolism of it is so strong, that sweeps aside those arguments very quickly.”

But Helms wasn’t interested in the outcome; he was interested in the show. Undoubtedly, then, he was tickled when one of the first Democrats to lash out at his filibuster was Ted Kennedy — precisely the kind of unabashedly liberal, integrationist Northern liberal who reminded those white Southern Democrats why they’d been abandoning their party in recent presidential elections. “Everybody who disagrees with Mr. Kennedy is a racist and right-winger,” Helms sneered. With a massive push underway to register black North Carolinians to vote, Helms was asked if his stand might hurt him in 1984. But he knew better: “I’m not getting any black votes, period.”

Within days, Helms struck a deal with Baker, then the chamber’s majority leader, to give up his filibuster. In exchange, the final vote would be put off for two weeks, which would give Helms time to pursue a legal bid to force the Justice Department to release the files that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had compiled on King. This, too, was a doomed mission, not that Helms cared. What it really meant was two more weeks at the center of a national media firestorm, making one more stand for old Dixie against Kennedy and the rest of the liberals.

The Senate debate kicked off on Oct. 18, a Tuesday, with Helms — his legal effort squelched by a federal judge the day before — offering a motion to send the bill back to the Judiciary Committee so that King’s ties to “elements of the Communist Party USA” could be fully explored. What he was really trying to do, though, was bait Kennedy into a face-to-face showdown. The Massachusetts Democrat, fully aware of what Helms was looking for, had already indicated that he wouldn’t respond personally to any of Helms’ claims. But his thinking changed when Helms brought up Kennedy’s two slain brothers, John and Robert, who had approved a temporary wiretap of King in the fall of 1963.

“His argument is not with the senator from North Carolina,” Helms said of Kennedy. “His argument is with his own dead brother who was president and with his dead brother who was the attorney general.”

That brought Kennedy to the floor to declare that “I am appalled at the attempt of some to misappropriate the memory of my brother Robert Kennedy and misuse it as part of this smear campaign. Those who never cared for him in life now invoke his name when he can no longer speak for himself.” Kennedy also accused Helms of making a “false” statement — that the King bill never received committee hearings. Helms immediately objected to Kennedy’s language, claiming that it was a violation of rules that prohibit senators from questioning each other’s honor. Baker convinced Kennedy to substitute the word “inaccurate,” though Kennedy did manage another swipe: “The senator,” he said of Helms, “needs to learn the rules.”

On and on it went, with one outraged liberal after another rising to defend King’s name and to take exception to Helms’ words. In a particularly memorable scene, New York’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan held up a binder of documents about King that Helms was promoting, pronounced it a “packet of filth,” and dropped it on the ground. Even Dole, who served as the bill’s floor manager, took on Helms, saying of his claim that the holiday would waste money, “Since when did a dollar sign take its place atop our moral code?”

Eventually, Helms’ motion was rejected, 76-12. So were a series of other motions designed to derail or alter the proposed holiday. The next day, the vote on the main bill was finally called, and it passed with ease, 78 to 22. “It’s a tyranny of the minority!” Helms roared.

Very quickly, it became clear that Helms’ grandstanding hadn’t been in vain. By the time the King fight was over, polls showed Hunt’s lead vanishing — down to single digits, less than half of what it had been months earlier. As the campaign unfolded, racial resentment became Helms’ prime weapon. Helms fliers and mailers featured large photos of Hunt and Jesse Jackson and cast the black voter registration drive as a sinister effort to disenfranchise whites. Helms himself told audiences that Hunt was a racist because he was relying on black voters, and in the closing stretch, he reminded voters that Hunt needed “the bloc vote” to win. Asked what he meant by that, Helms didn’t mince words: “the black vote.”

On Election Day 1984, Helms did what had looked impossible just over a year earlier: He beat Hunt. Divide and conquer had worked brilliantly. Whites went for Helms by a 63-37 percent ratio (the spreads were much bigger in rural areas). Blacks went for Hunt 99 to 1 percent. Overall, the ratio was 52 to 48 percent for the incumbent. On that same day, Reagan was reelected in a resounding landslide, while Republicans held on to their Senate majority. When it came to 1984, the King fight, clearly, hadn’t hurt the GOP.

And yet it was a momentous occasion in the rise of the modern Republican Party. For a century after the Civil War, the GOP had been the progressive party when it came to race and civil rights. But it all changed, virtually overnight, when the burgeoning conservative movement succeeded in nominating Barry Goldwater — who had joined the Southern filibuster of the Civil Rights Act that Lyndon Johnson signed in 1964 — to run against LBJ. This was the moment that white Southern conservatives like Helms, who had been Democrats their whole lives, began a steady, decades-long migration to the GOP. The King vote in ’83 demonstrated how far along that process was. Of the 22 “no” votes, 18 came from Republicans. Just two decades earlier, all but six of the 29 votes to filibuster Civil Rights had come from Democrats.

When the King holiday cleared the Senate, Dole called a press conference and heralded the fact that 37 Republicans had voted for it. It reflected, he claimed, his party’s inclusive spirit. But the scandal was that 18 of them hadn’t. And the message that most African Americans seemed to take from this was simple: The party that makes a home for Jesse Helms doesn’t deserve to be my home.