Happy MLK Assassination Riot Day, Washington!

Forty years ago tonight, Washington burned, baby, burned -- just as so many other cities burned after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. And it only took about 40 years to fix up some of the destroyed neighborhoods along H Street NE, 14th and U, and various other chunks of the District that ended up looking like Hiroshima after the Bomb. And now Wonkette's own Liz Glover says the National Guard actually burnt D.C. to the ground, not the freaked-out rioters.

Liz writes from her yoga studio on H Street NE:

I learned from my uncle today -- who was in the National Guard shortly after the riots in '68 when King was assassinated -- that the Guard used flammable tear gas canisters when quelling the riots.

He believes that the city was burned not by rioters who were allegedly setting the buildings on fire, but by the canisters.

When he asked a commander about it the commander simply said, "We don't discuss that."

But for all these years, the self righteous have been scolding the rioters with the "What kind of animals burn their own stores and homes to the ground?" routine when it was actually the National Guard.

H Street NE is making a comeback, finally. (My yoga studio was one of the first businesses to move in.) It's only taken 40 years.