A quick addendum to Jazz’s post from the weekend, covering President Obama’s rather inauspicious offering of his two cents on the Great Debate of Our Time. The Redskin’s attorney, Lanny Davis, was most distressed about the president’s comment that, “If I were the owner of the team and I knew that the name of my team, even if they’ve had a storied history, that was offending a sizable group of people, I’d think about changing it,” seeing as how the majority of Americans do not seem particularly offended about the name, and that there are other sports team that might be deserving of similar scrutiny:
He’s unaware of the data. He’s expressing an opinion. He happens to be wrong in not knowing about the data. If he knew about the data, I’m looking forward to him saying, ‘You know, now that I know from Lanny Davis about the data, I favor the Washington Redskins because there is not a sizable group [offended], by my own criteria.’ So I don’t know why he spoke out at a time like this, but I’m glad that he’s using that criteria, by that criteria, no name change is necessary. … President Obama has better things to worry about, but he should look at the Chicago Blackhawks who won the Stanley Cup and he’s never said a word about them.
I might merely suggest that, if President Obama would care to offer more presidential opinions about the welfare of Native Americans, he might begin by doing more than just paying some annual lip service to the top-down government control that keeps too many Indian reservations in perpetual states of third-world-like poverty.
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