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.

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Yesterday, around 3 p.m., a trend started emerging on Twitter. People began reciting a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. that seemed strangely apt for this occasion:

"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:

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The controversy centers on comments made by Barbour, the Mississippi governor and likely presidential candidate, to a Weekly Standard writer last year. The resulting profile already landed Barbour in trouble because he lauded the racist White Citizens Council of his hometown as a force for good.

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:

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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.)

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It was the fall of 1983 and Jesse Helms seemed destined for political extinction. The staunchly conservative senator was due to stand for reelection the following year, and polls in North Carolina showed him running far, far behind the Democrat who was gearing up to oppose him, Jim Hunt.

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.

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Martin Luther King III, president and chief executive officer of The King Center, was to deliver the keynote address at the annual holiday observance, held at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where his father preached from 1960 until his death in 1968.

He has linked the holiday honoring the winner of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize winner to the tragic shootings in Tucson, Ariz., which left six people dead and Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords fighting for her life, saying the horrific incident underscores the continued need for King's message.

King would have been 82 on Jan. 15. Members of the King family also planned to lay a wreath at the tombs of Martin Luther King Jr. and his widow, Coretta Scott King.

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But this, from Defense Department general counsel Jeh Johnson, is brazen even in the annals of misappropriations of King:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 13, 2011 – If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, would he understand why the United States is at war?

Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department’s general counsel, posed that question at today’s Pentagon commemoration of King’s legacy.

In the final year of his life, King became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, Johnson told a packed auditorium. However, he added, today’s wars are not out of line with the iconic Nobel Peace Prize winner’s teachings.

“I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack,” he said.

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At his rally with tens of thousands on the steps of Lincoln Memorial, Beck used the closing lines of then-candidate Obama's campaign stump speech of 2008.

"One man can change the world," Beck told the crowd. "That man or woman is you. You make the difference."

Obama used a similar message on the campaign trail. He used to say that once voice could change a room, one room could change a city, and one city could change a state. Obama liked to say that state could change a country and urged supporters to go out and change the world.

Beck says his supporters should do the same.

He says, "Look to the heavens. Look to God. And make your choice."

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The potential 2012 presidential candidate says those who fought at Bunker Hill and Gettysburg protected the freedoms that allowed thousands of people gather on the National Mall in Washington on the 47th anniversary of King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

While broadcaster Glenn Beck's rally isn't billed as a political event, Palin says voters must reject calls to "fundamentally transform America." Instead, she says "we must restore America."

Palin, whose son served in Iraq, says the country is at a perilous moment.

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In the promotional video "We Need Heroes," he claims, "This has nothing to do with politics. It has everything to do with -- who are we?" He venerates "our sacred American heroes and ideas" and proclaims that "we need a George Washington, or a Thomas Jefferson, or a Ben Franklin." Images of Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King provide a backdrop to a single word: honor.

Beck claims to be restoring not only honor, but truth: to be setting the record straight on liberal revisionist history. But his history is the most revisionist of all.

By invoking great American leaders in a call for apolitical heroism, Beck seeks to whitewash the political struggles and debates of earlier eras: to suggest that our finest leaders have always been above politics, and that to achieve their greatness, we need to rise above politics and do "the right thing."

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As the date grew near there was much chatter on the street to the effect that malcontents from far and wide intended to disrupt the event -- or worse. We, of course, were going to make sure they'd have to go through us first. This would, in the best case scenario, have resulted in a terribly bloody skirmish or perhaps numerous ones; in the worst, we'd all go down in a blaze of glory and there would be a riot of proportions not seen in the Republic, or at least its capital, in anyone's memory.

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You'd think as much as Beck prevaricates, he'd have gotten a little bit more convincing at it.

Beck, remember, was last seen deriding the Obama administration as "like the damn Planet of the Apes," which his defenders insisted had no racial subtext, yet Fox removed the reference from the show's transcript and video archive anyway. Last year, you'll recall, Beck called our first black president, who was raised by his white family, a "racist" with a "deep seated hatred of white people." News Corp. czar Rupert Murdoch was given many opportunities to separate himself from his star's remarks, and failed to.

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Recently Webb shook up the complacent establishment once again with a critique in the Wall Street Journal of race-based preferences in higher education, small business lending and other areas of public policy:

Our government should be in the business of enabling opportunity for all, not in picking winners. It can do so by ensuring that artificial distinctions such as race do not determine outcomes.

Webb's intervention is a reminder that, from the 1970s until the mid-1990s, there was a lively debate over race-based affirmative action between integrationist or "colorblind" liberals and liberals of the "identity politics" school. Most of the liberal critics of race-based policy were pro-labor liberals and social democrats, while many of its defenders were found among neoliberals, who favored inexpensive symbols of racial progress even as they sought to deregulate the economy, slash welfare and shrink the government.

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Certainly, the right-wing pundits who've taken to Fox News to attack the NAACP have warped the story. Glenn Beck has laughed off the notion of Martin Luther King as a radical. "The Civil Rights Movement," Beck says, "has been co-opted by progressives." He's horrified by the idea that "you need civil unrest in order to meet demands" -- apparently forgetting that civil unrest is pretty literally what the Civil Rights Movement was. For guys like Beck, black people on the receiving end of fire-hoses and police dogs were sticking up for free enterprise. As he put it, "It's the same rights that Abraham Lincoln and blacks and whites fought for in the Civil War. Those were the same rights that King fought for. Tonight, we're going to talk about those rights, individual rights." So, Lincoln and King: proto-libertarian individualists. Bull Connor and George Wallace, on the other hand? Probably liberal fascists. (Remember, they were Democrats!)

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All quite true, quite horrifying and quite edifying. As a politician Helms was, by my lights, a monster. But even Grendel had a mother. It's worth taking a break from the horror stories to ponder where Jesse Helms came from -- and to wonder, with a renewed frisson of horror, whether that might be where we are headed.

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"I can't stand it anymore!" she screamed, in tears. "I can't take it!"

It was April 4, 1968, and Hillary had just heard the news of Martin Luther King's assassination. The entire nation was grieving that day, but Hillary's anguish was especially palpable, because King himself had started her on her path to political awareness, when she'd shaken his hand after a sermon in Chicago.

The next day, Hillary marched in Boston's Post Office Square, returning to campus wearing a black armband. At a student body meeting at Houghton Memorial Chapel, she boldly spoke in favor of a two-day strike, nearly shouting down a professor who suggested that students give up their weekends instead.

"I'll give up my date Saturday night, Mr. Goldman, but I don't think that's the point," she said. "Individual consciences are fine, but individual consciences have to be made manifest."

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Dear Mr. Stimson,

I am an associate in the Washington office of Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, a New York-based, international firm with 1,100 lawyers. I practice general corporate litigation. I also represent, on a pro bono basis, five men who are being held as "enemy combatants" at the U.S. detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. "How can you defend terrorists?" is a question I'm sometimes asked when people learn about my pro bono work. On Jan. 11, in your capacity as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, you asked the same question of every lawyer representing detainees in Guantánamo.

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In "The Shape of Things to Come," curtains go up with a series of quotations from famous thinkers and others either directly or analogically related to 9/11, which seems a decent enough place to start thinking about America's destruction. From there, Marcus' introduction summons the voices of John Winthrop, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., who, in their most seminal speeches, repeat differing versions of a contract between Americans and God, as well as Americans and other Americans. For all three, the golden opportunity offered by the New Jerusalem of America, the opportunity to create a perfect community, comes with the threat that should perfection remain unattained, divine and mortal judgment will be swift, damning, eternal and seriously unpleasant (we're talking hail of bullets and brimstone). Basically, get with the utopia or nice knowing you.

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