Hightower Lowdown

Preachers talk about the Sunday saints" in their congregations —those people who make sure to sit in the front-row pews on Sunday mornings, but spend the other six days of the week wantonly violating commandments and ignoring the ethical teachings of the church.

I thought of Sunday saints when I saw that George W. Bush made a conspicuous, 15-minute stop to lay a wreath at the tomb of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta on the birthday of the great civil-rights leader. It was a carefully staged effort intended to suggest that George is a devotee of Dr. King's teachings and his historic fight for justice.

But within hours of leaving the wreath, Bush used a sneaky maneuver to appoint someone whom NAACP leader Julian Bond calls a "segregationist judge" to the federal appeals court— Mississippi's Charles Pickering, who has twice been rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee for being "insensitive" on racial issues.

The disparity between George's posturing and his policies wasn't lost on the people of Atlanta. Bush had actually flown there for a million- dollar fund-raiser, but hundreds of King's faithful greeted him with a cascade of boos and protest chants. George's handlers put police in riot gear atop a row of buses to keep the people in their place—a perfect example of the kind of establishment show of force against common folks that Dr. King would have recognized and rebelled against.