I didn’t think Rocklin Republican Kevin Kiley could be worse than I thought. But he is

I have a dream, and it’s that someone of Assemblyman Kevin Kiley’s truly noxious political character couldn’t be elected to Congress.

A surprising/not surprising column by The Bee’s Hannah Holzer, which revealed that the Rocklin Republican lauded the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his Harvard senior thesis, left me feeling that the 3rd Congressional District candidate was even worse than I thought. And I had thought that unlikely.

For example, the intellectually flexible Kiley wrote these gems:

“To purportedly exclude all values is to live in a state of utter deception, as any political judgment is necessarily motivated by something.”

“What MLK’s philosophy implies is that rights provide the basis by which not merely individuals but communities and societies can live out a vision of the good — through politics. …”

Just not through Kiley’s current politics, which are more political gymnastics than political judgment.

Kiley writes approvingly of King’s philosophy and goes on to say it’s generally Republican.

Huh.

Republican groups have claimed for years that MLK was a Republican. King’s family, his civil rights allies and scholars have always said he was neither Democratic nor Republican. PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking site of the Florida-based Poynter Institute, also shot down the MLK-was-Republican story in 2011.

The site did report that MLK’s father often favored Republicans in presidential campaigns. But that was when Southern Democrats were fully invested in the oppression of Black people.

To give Kiley a short but pertinent history lesson, in 1960, King was incarcerated at Georgia State Prison, and the two major presidential candidates, Democratic Sen. John F. Kennedy and Republican Vice President Richard Nixon, were struggling with how to respond. Kennedy’s adviser Harris Wofford had JFK call King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, to express his concern. After the call, King’s father said he was no longer supporting Nixon for the presidency.

According to the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford, MLK was disappointed that Nixon didn’t call. “When this moment came, it was like he had never heard of me,” King said, according to the institute.

By 1968, Nixon was employing a “Southern strategy” that relied on racial dog whistles to scare white voters — which was, um, not anything the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would have approved of.

Kiley’s “vision of the good through politics” is now diametrically opposed to what King stood for. Ironically, King’s actual vision of good through politics is represented by Kiley’s opponent, Dr. Kermit Jones, who was also a Navy officer and happens to be Black.

Kiley is a paper-doll cutout of a man who has thrown away whatever wisdom he might have gained from his Harvard-Yale education in pursuit of political power. Public service is not what he’s about.

His every adult move after his post-university Teach for America stint has been a calculation, an abdication, a cynical adjustment. It’s embarrassing and transparent, and it should be disqualifying.

Now it isn’t. Now it’s just another day at the office in the proto-fascist GOP of Donald Trump.

Kiley once supported Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a thoroughly respectable, qualified presidential candidate. Now he grovels for Trump’s endorsement and gets it.

Would Kiley ask for Abraham Lincoln’s endorsement? Nah. Today Lincoln would be a radioactive RINO (Republican in name only).

Kiley, an anti-MLK, is living a life of utter deception. Like his new role model, Trump, he seeks only power. Truth is an afterthought.

Kiley’s career would make an excellent senior thesis for someone. It could be entitled, “I Have a Dream — No, Never Mind. It’s Not Politically Expedient.”