Which is nothing new, really — though as with Bob Costas, one wonders why it’s so suddenly racist now that all the liberal lemmings have started lining up for their places in tiny, metal PC boxes — only in this instance, I was listening live, and the charge carried with it an accusation that the person defending the name, Mike Ditka, was himself “a racist,” followed by intimation by a fellow broadcast personality that perhaps Ditka should be fired for having what amounts to a difference of opinion over what constitutes actual racism.

For instance, Ditka believes — and the club’s history backs him up — that the original name, a play on the Boston Braves, was meant as a honorarium to a Native American coach.  But rather than rehearse that documented history yet again, I’d like to offer a few new thoughts.  First, one of the arguments Darren McKee (aka DMac) made, is that just because something was okay at one time doesn’t mean it’s okay now.  Though I can’t read his mind, I suspect one of the antecedents he had in mind when he made this comment was slavery, which of course has nothing whatever to do with the Redskins, the linguistic implications of a demand in name change, etc.  But then, he’s a liberal sports talk host, so he can be forgiven for such blazing ignorance and such a glorious non-sequitur.

Second — and what irked me the most — was twofold, and is deserving of this public bitchslapping:  it’s easy, as McKee proved, to cavalierly and without even a moment’s thought of repercussions, accuse a real-life person of a truly heinous mindset.  That McKee believes he can see into Ditka’s heart and declare him “racist” based around arguments that have been made by many others, including the Native Americans he pretends to champion (although I guess the ones who aren’t offended by the “racist” team name aren’t really authentic natives, and are more like Uncle Tontos than the real Native Americans that this pasty white liberal sportstalk house presumes to speak for) is problematic enough; that he does so from a safe distance and without fear of being punched in the face for suggesting such a thing without any proof is part of the problem with these types of claims and the people who make them:  not only do they do a disservice to those who are the victims of actual racism while widening the pool of “racists” to include just about everyone they disagree with, reducing the charge of racism to a mere rhetorical trope; but they don’t ever have to answer for having made the accusation.

My solution is to have “DMac” invite Mike Ditka to the studio and call him a racist directly to his face.  Or, if he prefers not to, he can detail the case for Ditka’s racism, which surely must go beyond his rather familiar argument that the current referent to “Washington Redskins” are a bunch of largely brown and white skinned professional football players being paid by Daniel Snyder to represent the DC franchise, and not an invocation of some kind of slur (especially since Native Americans themselves, by a healthy percentage, don’t want the name changed; that Native Americans themselves refer to each other historically as red skins or red people; and that Oklahoma literally translated means roughly the same thing, meaning after years of Sooners games, sportscasters everywhere should suddenly demand the college either change states or that the state change its name.  Perhaps to DMacLand or Costasville.

Phil Simms has decided he might not use the name during his broadcasts of the team’s games.  Fine. I like Simms, but I think if he goes this route (and I include Tony Dungy here, too) he’ll looks foolish, cowardly, and risk-averse — and that anyone who follows suit will be doing damage to our language by allowing that something clearly not meant as a slur must be a slur because certain people have decided it offends them.  And I’ll make sure never to have Simms or Dungy over while I’m using a spade in my garden, just to keep them from having  mini-strokes.

With DMac, on the other hand, the situation is far more sinister. Because not only does he want to hand over control of language to the heckler’s veto, but he likewise wouldn’t be averse to seeing a broadcaster, who makes his living engaging in speech, lose his livelihood because the speech he engaged didn’t comport with the current hairshirted liberal orthodoxy.

— All of which is doubly ironic, given that a day earlier DMac had noted how happy he was that the TV show “Naked and Afraid” finally featured a black cast member, because he was “tired of looking at white asses.”  Oh, and yes, he was “impressed” by the black contestants, er, attributes.

What a fucking hypocrite.  So much of what’s wrong with this country tied into a tiny little poseur’s bow.