I can’t say this counts as news-y — the guy’s a self-described “ultra-ultra-ultra-conservative” and Palin fan so go figure that he’s impatient with political correctness — but it sure is red-meat-y and palate cleanse-y. After listening to it, I’m almost inclined to forgive him for refusing to blow up Obama’s political career on the launchpad in 2004 by running for Senate in Illinois, an idea Ditka toyed with but ultimately declined to pursue. “Biggest mistake I’ve ever made,” he later said. And now here we are 10 years later, with the leader of the free world watching the world melt down from the 18th green. So, so weird. It’s like time-traveling into the future and finding out that Skynet and its army of Terminators could have been prevented if only Tony Siragusa had run for Congress.

Anyway, he’s fighting a losing battle here:

“The league respectfully honored my request not to officiate Washington,” [Mike] Carey said. “It happened sometime after I refereed their playoff game in 2006, I think.”

For almost all of the final eight seasons and 146 games of Carey’s career, the first African American referee to work a Super Bowl — the official named with Ed Hochuli as the best in the game in a 2008 ESPN poll of coaches — essentially told his employers his desire for a mutually respectful society was so jeopardized by Washington’s team name that he could not bring himself to officiate the games of owner Daniel Snyder’s team.

“It just became clear to me that to be in the middle of the field, where something disrespectful is happening, was probably not the best thing for me,” Carey said.

Carey was quietly, and now not so quietly, protesting the Redskins name for the past eight years unbeknownst to the wider public. He shares an employer now in CBS Sports with Phil Simms, who’s also considering dropping “Redskins” from his vocabulary when he covers one of the team’s games a few weeks ago. For all the sturm und drang in the media, especially lefty media, over the “Redskins” name the past 18 months or so, the NFL’s been highly effective at keeping a lid on it among league personnel and their adjuncts, the broadcast teams. Once that starts changing, though, the elephant will be fully inside the room and then the league, and Dan Snyder, will face more pressure to make it go away. We’ll see what Simms does. Quite frankly, after calling them the “Redskins” absentmindedly for decades, I doubt I could police myself well enough during a running commentary to refer to them exclusively as “Washington.”