Given how much evil there is in the world; given how many signs of moral, intellectual and economic decline there are here in America; and given the increasing irrelevance of America to world events, it is fair to ask why the American Left is preoccupied with the name Washington "Redskins."
The Washington Redskins have been in existence for 82 years. For about 80 of those years, virtually no one, including the vast majority of American Indians, was troubled by the name.
Yet, it is now of such importance to the American left that the majority leader of the United States Senate has repeatedly demanded, from the floor of the United States Senate, that the team drop its name; 50 United States senators, all of them Democrats, have signed an open letter demanding the same; Sports Illustrated's Peter King no longer uses the name; other leading sportswriters have adopted the same practice; and the president of the United States has weighed in on the issue.
The pressure is relentless. There is more concern in the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times -- not to mention the rest of the left -- with the Redskins than with Internal Revenue Service targeting conservative groups for investigation, one of its division heads pleading the Fifth Amendment before Congress, and the Agency's losing all relevant emails and hard drives.
The angry will tell you that the name "Redskins" is profoundly offensive to American Indians and that they -- the angry -- are simply more sensitive to racial slurs than others.
This explanation is self-serving, but insufficient.
The great majority of American Indians understandably just don't care. Like heterosexual AIDS and so many other crises, this has been entirely manufactured by the left. Since 1947, there has been a movie theater, the Redskins Theatre (with the same logo as the football team), in Anadarko, Oklahoma, a city whose population is divided evenly between Indians and whites, and which calls itself the "Indian Capital of the Nation." Why, in 67 years, have the Indian populations of Anadarko and Oklahoma not changed this theater's name?
Because the left hadn't made it an issue. It's not an Indian issue; it's a left-wing issue.
And why is the left so preoccupied?
It isn't because they are more morally sensitive to injustice. That is what the left believes about itself. But there are other reasons for the manufactured hysteria about the Redskins name. Here are some:
Dennis Prager is a SRN radio show host, contributing columnist for Townhall.com and author of his newest book, “The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code.”