Should kids look up to Martin Luther King Jr as a role model? You might think they should, but that’s just because you are another liberal Frankly Curious reader with no more sense than God gave a donkey — and not one of the smart one, but one who went to school on the little bus. You see, it turns out that King was not a perfect man. You may have heard about extramarital affairs. In addition to this, King was much shorter than Malcolm X. How can you look up to a man who is so short. (Disclosure: Martin Luther King Jr was exactly my height.)

All of that might have been overlooked. But did you know that MLK was a plagiarizer?! Thirty-six years after he got his PhD in systematic theology, a Boston University committee found that, “There is no question but that Dr King plagiarized in the dissertation by appropriating material from sources not explicitly credited in notes, or mistakenly credited, or credited generally and at some distance in the text from a close paraphrase or verbatim quotation.” Can you imagine?! The man didn’t properly footnote his dissertation!

It is important at this point to note that it is because students tend to take these kinds of shortcuts that there are dissertation committees. In my experience, dissertations are not given sufficient scrutiny. But there is a good reason for this. Most people are far more interested in whether the new work is important and correct. Most of any given dissertation is just a retelling of what work has gone before. And in this case, the same committee that found that King had plagiarized also found that his dissertation made an important contribution to scholarship, which is the only thing that matters.

There is little doubt that King’s dissertation has been picked over more than almost anyone’s in history. The reason for this is doubtless good and bad. There are those who want to diminish him, because let’s face it: there are a lot of people who still don’t think African Americans should vote. But on the other hand, there are many who just want to know who the great man was.

And now we know: Martin Luther King Jr was a man, like so many others. But he was also a man who did great things. And his worst doesn’t even rise to the level of my worst. And it is in the noise compared to men like Ronald Reagan. So yes: children should admire Martin Luther King Jr. We all should. We should admire him for the great things he did. And the fact that he was a little lose with his dissertation citations and his marriage vows doesn’t mean a thing.

Libby Nelson wrote a great article over at Vox this week, Ranking High Schools Tells You Which Schools Are Rich or Selective. It isn’t about the Education Reform movement. But it does show the lie to it. The article is based on The Daily Beast ranking of the 700 best high schools in the United States. And surprise: the best schools are the ones that are rich or only let in the best students.

But don’t forget: the issue is teacher tenure and nothing upsetting to the power elite like school funding! We have an educational system that, like most of our society, is set up to help those least in need of help and to let those most in need of help languish as we tell them, “Anyone can make it in America; if you haven’t made it, it is your own damned fault!” It is pathetic and I can’t think about it without thinking what an idiot Jonathan Chait is.

Of the top ten schools on the list, only one has a student body where over half the students (63%) get free or reduced-cost lunches. It is the School of Science/Engineering in Dallas. And it is selective. The best students from throughout the Dallas area go there. So it isn’t surprising that 100% graduate or that 98% are college bound or that 100% take Advanced Placement courses. These are largely students that would do this in any environment.

What we are seeing is that the policies of those in the Education Reform movement have already succeeded at mostly separating the best students out of the normal public school system. This allows them to scream all the louder about how the public school system is not performing for our children. The whole thing is based upon the fact that poor children don’t do as well as rich children for the normal environmental reasons as well as unequal funding of schools. And the Education Reformers have managed to make the situation even worse for the average poor child.

If we lived in a rational country, we would look at The Daily Beast rankings and decide that we had to do something about inequality in our educational system. Instead, we just seem to shrug, “What are you gonna do?!” I suspect that among conservatives, the unstated belief is that the rich are just better than the poor and that’s why their kids do better. It’s all just status quo apologetics.

At her blog, Diane Ravitch recently wrote, Researcher: Success Charter Chain Built on Hyperbole. It notes that the Success Academy charter schools have just lied about who they serve and how well they perform. For example, they claim that they serve the same number of special needs students. But, in fact, while less than 1% of their students have special needs, over 10% of the public schools in the area have special needs students. They do this same kind of misrepresentation in many other ways. I think we would all agree that, just as The Daily Beast rankings show, if you only pick the best students for your school, you will do better.

It is annoying to have to discuss these things. Whenever I do get into an argument with people in the Education Reform movement, they always say the same thing: we can’t do anything about school funding, but we can do something about teacher “tenure”! So it’s the same old American idea: it is better to do something, regardless of how bad it may be, than to do nothing at all. And in the case of Education Reform, the people who determine what can be done are billionaire “philanthropists” like Billie and Mindy.

In 50 years, when The Daily Beast ranks the top high schools in America, it will find the same thing: the best schools are filled with rich and specially-selected students. And the only thing that will have changed is that teachers’ unions will be long gone, teachers will be paid a lot less, and the poorest students will be served even worse than they now are. But not to worry! Rory John Gates III (Billie’s great-grandson) will get a great education!

Steve Biko was a political activist who worked against the apartheid regime in South Africa. In the late 1960s, he helped to form South African Students’ Organization and was its first president. By 1972, his political activities were so successful that he was thrown out of college. And the following year he was “banned” by the South African government. That meant he was forbidden from speaking to more than one person at a time. And he was confined to his township. And he could not write for or speak to the media.

Let us take a step back from this. In the United States at this time and for another decade and a half, conservatives in the United States spoke of apartheid South Africa as though it were the shining light of democracy in Africa. According to these conservatives, the rulers of South Africa were the modern incarnations of the Founding Fathers. But we all know what was really going on. The rules were white, so it didn’t matter what they did. And the oppressed were black, so it didn’t matter what was done to them.

Despite these restrictions, Biko continued to organize. The Soweto Uprising was highly successful, and was put down by the regime with its characteristic restraint by setting dogs on the school children and then shooting them. At least a couple hundred where killed and over a thousand wounded. After this, the regime decided that they really needed to go after Steve Biko, even though he was not directly involved.

On 18 August 1977, Biko was arrested at a check point under a law that ought to sound familiar to Americans who have been paying any attention to events in America over the last several decades, Terrorism Act No 83 of 1967. He was tortured for 22 hours. This resulted in Biko slipping into a coma. Then he was chained to a window grill for a day. Just short of four weeks later, he was transported 700 miles to a prison that had hospital facilities. He died the next day — 12 September 1977 — 37 years ago today. Wikipedia provides the following tragic but entirely typical conclusion, “The police claimed his death was the result of an extended hunger strike, but an autopsy revealed multiple bruises and abrasions and that he ultimately succumbed to a brain hemorrhage from the massive injuries to the head…” You know: the police never do anything wrong. And they can never be held accountable regardless, “After a 15-day inquest in 1978, a magistrate judge found there was not enough evidence to charge the officers with murder because there were no eyewitnesses.”

The one good thing about Biko’s death was that it really did publicize just how awful the apartheid system was. Over 10,000 people came to Biko’s funeral. So he was a martyr to the cause that he had worked his whole adult life for. So I can see the beauty in his life and ultimate sacrifice. But it mostly just fills me with rage.

Here is Peter Gabriel’s song “Biko”:

It seems like the time for these signs, right? During World War II, the British government used these “Keep Calm and Carry On” motivational posters to keep morale up as cities were being bombed. But that’s not like us. We don’t go in for that whole “stiff upper lip” thing. Panic and horror are more our way.

Think about the Rambo films. That’s your modern America right there. It isn’t about thinking through things and making the best of a bad situation. It is about taking a bad situation and making it much worse. We believe above all in freaking out, as long as we get a nice happy ending where the mentally broken homicidal hero kills everyone and is safe to do the same thing in the sequel.

So have at it, my fellow Americans! Let’s panic and freak out! I only request one thing: don’t pretend that we are strong. We aren’t. We are like frightened children. And we aren’t rational. We’ve allowed some bad news in the world (And there is always that!) to be used against us to push television ratings up and increase the power of disingenuous politicians. But there is nothing new is that. That’s what we always do!

This is why we are always for the newest war. We chant, “We’re number one! We’re number one!” And then, after a few years, we calm down. The sky wasn’t really falling. There weren’t terrorists under our beds. Heart disease and cancer are still by far the most common ways we die. And we look back and say what we always say, “That was a mistake.”

So let’s sing it all together:

Because that’s the important thing. In fact, that’s the American thing. Overreact to everything. Behave badly. Look back on it with shame. But don’t learn anything, because that might change the cycle. And if Americans didn’t constantly freak out about everything, how would we know we were Americans?

Jonathan Bernstein is frustrated, Ted Cruz’s Empty “Sister Souljah” Moment. He can’t figure out why people would call this a “Sister Souljah” moment. I share his frustration, but it is easy enough to explain: smarter conservatives are so desperate to find signs of the slightest amount of reasonableness in the Republican Party that they act stupidly. And shockingly, the conservative doing this today is the generally very smart and insightful David Weigel.

What Ted Cruz did was very simple. He blasted some Middle East Christians for not being big enough supporters of Israel. Not surprisingly, the people he spoke to did not like what he said. They booed him. But since when it angering an audience a “Sister Souljah” moment? If that were the case, Chris Christie would have a long line of such moments. But no one thinks he does. Instead, they think he is just a bully.

The point of a “Sister Souljah” moment is to increase your “moderate” credibility by attacking part of your own constituency. Democrats are great at this. The New Democrats don’t seem to believe in anything so much as they do attacking their own base. Criticizing the labor movement is hugely popular. Such moments are extremely rare coming from Republicans. But Bernstein notes a good one: Rand Paul attacking voter ID laws. And how do we know it was a “Sister Souljah” moment? Because he almost immediately backpedaled. What he said really was an offense to his base and an effort to appeal to the middle. The same can be said of Chris Christie’s attack on anti-Muslim bigots.

But what exactly did Ted Cruz risk? Unwavering support for Israel is absolute Republican orthodoxy. Going before unfriendly audiences to tell them that you are just as extreme as ever is not a “Sister Souljah” moment. It shows a little bit of guts. But no one has ever questioned that Ted Cruz is a true believer who is willing to tell anyone that he is right and they are wrong. Weigel is pushing the definition of the term so far that Ted Cruz’s Green Eggs and Ham filibuster could be so named. After all, he was telling all of America things they didn’t want to hear.

But what’s going on with Weigel? It’s got to be that he just got excited. But this kind of thing really calls into question his objectivity. And this is something he clearly prizes. As a libertarian, he takes a kind of centrist position so he can laugh at both sides. But this article is off the rails. It is titled, Watch Ted Cruz Turn a Political Problem Into a Pro-Israel Sister Souljah Moment. And it ends, “Sister Souljah achievement: Unlocked.” That sounds more like cheerleading rather than reporting or even analysis. And this is always the problem with people who have major ideological axes to grind pretending that they don’t.

It’s 9/11, there is another drumbeat for war with Iraq, and the neoconservatives are everywhere telling us we must make the same mistakes they helped us make a decade earlier. This raises the question, why does anyone care what they have to say? Jonathan Chait wrote a very good article about the neoconservative reaction to the threat from ISIS, Dick Cheney and the Neocons Would Like to Celebrate This 9/11 by Freaking Out Over Iraq Again. Before Chait has a chance to write a corresponding article about people like me on the other side of the question, I thought I would run through his insights and see if there is anything there worth thinking about.

His intensions were not to explain why the neoconservatives act as they do, but only to describe the basis of their arguments. There are four aspects. First, there is the focus on being “serious” in response to the threat. Second, there is an apocalyptic assessment of the threat. Third, there is the blurring or complete erasure of the distinctions between various parties. And fourth, there is the dismissal of the possibility that anything bad might happen because of overreaction; the only threat comes from not reacting enough.

What’s especially interesting about this is the focus of on “seriousness.” The truth is that their ideas are deeply unserious. The overall vision is this: we should go to war with everyone we don’t like in the region because ISIS is an existential threat to us and the only thing that might hurt us is if we don’t act right now with overwhelming force. Last night, Ted Cruz went on Fox News and said that there is a threat that ISIS is coming through the Mexico border, even though when pressed he admitted that there were no credible indications that this was happening.

What this all reminds me of is Malcolm Nance’s observation of the neocons at the State Department under Bush after 9/11 and their desire for “Tom Clancy Combat Concepts”:

The key word in that description is “childlike.” It’s like a game to these people. This is why the major neoconservatives are chicken hawks. They have to be. They can’t understand anything about real war. And they don’t understand what Karl von Clausewitz laid out 200 years ago, although the idea is far older than that, “War is not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.”

What’s amazing is how the media take all this posturing as serious enough for coverage. What the neocons offer in terms of policy is far less serious than what the Quakers offers on the other side: war is always wrong. Yet no major news outlet thinks that the Quaker take on geopolitics needs to be considered. In fact, even people of my persuasion who think that war should be the last option are not considered serious enough for much coverage. Instead, the “liberal” response to any problem is just to drop bombs on people, which is still, you know, war.

I know what the media would say about this. People like Cheney and Cruz running around doing their Chicken Little routine has to be covered. They are obviously passionate about the threat they see, even if it is not a substantial threat. But these same media apologists don’t seem to think that the far larger group of people who are worried about global warming need to be given a huge amount of coverage.

I doubt that anyone seriously thinks that the neoconservatives have any credibility at this point. But the media have a vested interest in pushing for war. It’s good for ratings. Getting everyone worried about global warming would only result in policy and, you know, people working to fix the problem. But Cheney and company running around frightening the nation would result in super cool war footage that would likely go on for years.

I’ve managed to avoid talking about ISIS in any direct way. But I guess I cannot any longer. MSNBC has eliminated its normal evening coverage so it could talk about Obama’s Big Speech™ before and then after. I’m writing this before he has spoken, but I know what he is going to say: I have the authority to attack ISIS in Syria and I will attack ISIS in Syria because this is a Very Big Deal™. It’s interesting that everyone was rightly all over Obama for his entirely political decision to delay dealing with immigration. But in this cace no one is calling his decision political. It is.

The media have managed to work American people up into yet another of their fear and anger tantrums. And so the call has gone out. The Batman light is shining on the clouds above. “Please save us! Do something! Make our fear go away!” So Obama “reluctantly” accepts what all the “liberal” and conservative analysts always say: more bombing in more places until it becomes clear that it isn’t doing any good. And then do what these very same analysts recommend — More bombing! — because, “We can’t stop now!” See the sunk cost fallacy for more details.

The problem is that soon — maybe months or maybe years — everyone will say, “You know, that was a mistake!” Of course, the conservatives are going to complain regardless. If it goes reasonably well, they will complain that Obama didn’t act sooner. If it goes badly, they will claim that it was stupid to do what he did. But they aren’t alone. Everyone will second guess him after the fact.

The truth is that these things never go well, because war should be a last resort. But instead, with the United States, it is one of the first things in the diplomatic toolbox that we reach to. And in the current situation, we can’t forget that ISIS is the result of a previous foreign misadventure. And this decision is based on the same kind of logic. This time it is, “Sure ISIS isn’t a direct threat to the United States, but if we leave it alone, it might turn into one in the future.”

Let’s think about that. What have Democrats been screaming about for over a decade? “Preemptive war!” And what is this? Preemptive war! And the difference between this Iraq War (with a sub-war in Syria) and the last? I guess it is that the first one was a full invasion and this one isn’t. But we’ve seen mission creep in the past. And we are already seeing it in the present. The sunk cost fallacy is probably at its most intense in war.

I’ll admit, I’m almost always against war. And I’m sure there are many people who would consider my opinion less credible because of that. But if you look at the history of war from afterward, you will see that most people feel the same way. So I think what I bring to this discussion is a little emotional distance. I am not any more fearful or angry than I usually am. Unthinkable horrors are committed to Americans every sing day. Most of them are done by other Americans. Many of them are done by the American government itself. So I don’t think that there is anything new to worry about, with all due respect to James Foley and Steven Sotloff.

Now that the President has given his talk, I get to say: told ya! There were a lot of nice words. Obama has always been good with nice words. He started out with his greatest hits: withdrawal from Iraq, killing of Osama bin Laden, and those new tan suits. Then he went through the four things that the administration was going to do to crush ISIS. They all kind of got mushed together because they were mostly about saying, “We’ll do air strikes the other people in our partner countries will die!” But there was one take home of the speech, “Congress should work with us but we don’t need them because we have the power and the authority to bomb Syria.” Told ya!

Personally, I don’t care. Whether the President decides to pander to the unreasonable fear and anger of the American people or where he is joined by Congress, it doesn’t matter. An escalation of this mission is a bad idea. And before long, the American people will realize this — just like always. But it might be good for the Democrats in November. But that’s a hell of a way to manage our foreign policy. Not that I’m saying that the American voters deserve better. Because they seem to demand this kind of hopeless governance.