Dan Snyder

Monday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 7/13/2020: “Hail To The Thingamajiggies!” Edition [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

How.

1. When late is worse than never. Reports say that the Washington Redskins will officially announce that they are changing their name, to what nobody knows, not even them. The team’s obnoxious owner, Dan Snyder, who has run the once cultishly popular and successful NFL franchise into the ground during his incompetent stewardship, had memorably said that he would never change the controversial team name, unquestionably the most politically incorrect in all of sports. That pledge did not anticipate his league going nuts and supine before the George Floyd Freakout, to the point that there may be mandatory kneeling by the time the 2020 season opens.

The attack on the Redskins name was always about power, as has been the decades-long assault on all team nicknames with ethnic references. Survey after survey has shown that the vast majority of Native Americans don’t care; the idea is to bring corporate interests to heel, and then aim at the next, more substantive objective. The competent way for a team to handle this problem is to quietly retire a problematic name like “Redskins” (or a anachronistically provocative logo like the Cleveland Indians’ Chief Wahoo) when the heat is off, making it clear that the change is volitional and not compelled. Then the social justice mob members can’t puff out their little pigeon chests with pride and think “I did this! What’s the next target?”

I don’t care what the D.C. team’s name is. I do care about dishonest and illogical arguments, which is what have been mounted against this name for as long as I can remember. That’s why the Redskins and related matters have so often been a topic here.

I did laugh yesterday when I read a comment predicting that Snyder would announce that the new name would be “the Washington Murderous Savages”… Continue reading →

The Redskins Native American Poll: Integrity Check For Progressives And Race-Baiters

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Washington-Redskins

My Washington Post is filled with articles and columns reacting to the “surprising” poll results released yesterday—a poll taken by the Post itself— that appears to settle a manufactured controversy of long-standing. If it doesn’t, that will tell us more about those who resist than it does about the merits of the controversy itself.

The Washington Post-commissioned poll shows that 9 in 10 Native Americans are not offended by the Washington Redskins name, despite a steady tom-tom beat of complaints and insults from activists, pandering politicians, cultural bullies and politically correct journalists insisting otherwise. The poll, which was analyzed by age, income, education, political party or proximity to reservation, shows that the minds of Native Americans have remained unchanged since a 2004 poll by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found the same result. (Actually,  Native Americans are somewhat less offended by the name than twelve years ago.)

The immediate question that the poll raises is one that Ethics Alarms has raised repeatedly as a rhetorical one. As the Post wrote today, speaking specifically of the segment of the sports media that had been so doctrinaire in attacking the name, even to the point of censoring it:

“Can they be offended on behalf of a group that they’re not part of, especially a group that appears, overwhelmingly, not to be offended by the word media figures object to?”

To ask the question is to answer it.  If the name in fact isn’t offensive to the group it is claimed to offend, then it is ridiculous for non-Native American to continue to be offended on their behalf.

Thus the poll results pose an excellent test of integrity and honesty for all of the liberals, politicians, political correctness junkies, pundits, social justice warriors and fringe Native American activists who have been so insulting and shrill to supporters of the name. Do they have the courage and fairness to admit they were wrong? Can the ideologically programmed ever do this: do facts matter, or is it essential for them to interpret the world according to cant rather than bend, adapt and compromise to inconvenient, messy reality?

Well, we shall see. The Post’s early results do not speak well for the anti-Redskins zealots. Continue reading →

More Obama Administration Abuse of Power In The Service of Political Correctness

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

 redskins

From the Washington Post:

Efforts to lure the Washington Redskins back to the District have come up against a potentially insurmountable challenge: the Obama administration’s objections to the team’s name.Interior Secretary Sally Jewell told D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser this spring that the National Park Service, which owns the land beneath Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, was unlikely to accommodate construction of a new stadium for the Redskins unless the team changes its name.

Jewell oversees both national park land and America’s trust and treaty relationships with Native American tribes.Her decision not to extend the District’s lease of the RFK land badly hinders Bowser’s bid to return the Redskins to D.C. — and boosts efforts to lure the team across the Potomac to Northern Virginia.

It is also a blatant abuse of government power and an  insult to the spirit and intent of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Continue reading →

Ethics Train Wreck Updates: The Obama Presidency and The Washington Redskins

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Obama golfing

1. Update: The Obama Presidency Ethics Train Wreck

This has been a week dominated by Ethics Train Wrecks old and new: the Ferguson Express, which will presumably slow down for a few months until we find out what the grand jury does and why; the previously dormant Donald Sterling choo-choo, which came around another bend in its tracks, and, predictably, the Ethics Train Wreck that is the entire Obama Presidency, highlighted by the President more or less intentionally refusing to act like an engaged leader, happily going back to fun on the links after making a statement regarding an American journalist beheaded on video by terrorists.

Naturally the latter concerns me more than the rest, but I have realized that most of those who are in permanent denial about this leader’s ineptitude simply don’t want to process the truth in this regard. Mention the obvious, or what should be, that this frightening confluence of crises domestic and foreign is an irresponsible time to be perceived as taking a break, and one is bombarded by specious comparisons with Bush or JFK’s home away from home on Cape Cod. Some observers have the integrity to concede what many–you know, those mean Obama critics who are out to get him because he’s black–correctly discerned long ago. Here’s The New York Times, consistently one of the President’s most incorrigible apologists:

“Yet the juxtaposition of his indignant denunciation of terrorists and his outing on the greens this week underscored the unintended consequences of such a remove. If Mr. Obama hoped to show America’s enemies that they cannot hijack his schedule, he also showed many of his friends in America that he disdains the politics of appearance. He long ago stopped worrying about what critics say, according to aides, and after the outcry over Wednesday’s game, he defied the critics by golfing again on Thursday, his eighth outing in 11 days on the island.

It was all the more striking given that Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain canceled his vacation after the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria released the video showing Mr. Foley’s death because the accent of the masked killer suggested he came from Britain. Former Vice President Dick Cheney told Fox News that Mr. Obama would “rather be on the golf course than he would be dealing with the crisis.”

But the criticism went beyond the usual political opponents. Privately, many Democrats shook their heads at what they considered a judgment error.”

It is not a judgment error at all. It is just another example of Obama’s flat, flat, flat learning curve regarding leadership. Continue reading →

“What Would Jesus Do?” My Guess: Devote His Energy To Something Other Than Forcing A Free Citizen To Re-Name His Own NFL Team

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

jesus football

The Central Atlantic Conference of the United Church of Christ, consisting of 180 congregations with 40,000 members from Richmond to New Jersey, voted unanimously to boycott of the Washington Redskins’ games and merchandize at its annual meeting. This decision is expected to pass to the national governing body of the church, which oversees 5,100 congregations with about 1 million members, which is expected to endorse it.

It would be good to know that the world is in such fine shape that this is the most pressing of our earthly challenges as far as United Church of Christ can see. Unfortunately, that’s not the import of this story. The story shows how political correctness, illicitly pursued by the abuse of official power, can and will spread throughout the culture, leading institution and organizations to believe that it is ethical to try to bend others to their will based on subjective views of “offensiveness.” It is not, however. Continue reading →

The President And The Redskins: Learning Curve Flat As Ever

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments
An updated graph of President Obama's learning curve on his practice of gratuitous commentary on the jobs, businesses, and duties of others. Oddly, it looks exactly like the last such graph, and the graph before that...

The  updated graph of President Obama’s learning curve regarding the Presidential practice of gratuitous commentary on the jobs, businesses, and duties of others. Oddly, it looks exactly like the last such graph, and the graph before that…

In the long list of example of President Obama interfering with private decisions, court cases and local matters that the occupant of highest office in the land has an obligation not to meddle in, his comments on the Washington Redskins are among the least annoying. It was a wishy-washy statement, all in all, that he gave to the AP:

“If I were the owner of the team and I knew that there was a name of my team — even if it had a storied history — that was offending a sizable group of people, I’d think about changing it.”

Does anyone doubt that owner of the Washington Redskins, Dan Snyder, hasn’t thought about it? On its face, the statement is petty, but of course, as the President resolutely refuses to learn, everything the President of the United States says, scripted or non-, regarding national policy or local matters, be they about red lines or how victims of gun violence look like his son, the President’s comments are seized upon, blown out of proportion, spun, used as weapons, provocations and ammunition, and generally warp public policy discourse, public opinion and personal and local decision-making. Continue reading →

Frivolous Charge of the Month (Runner-Up): Redskins Owner and Ethics Dunce, Dan Snyder

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Most NFL fans know that Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder is the most hapless, inept, and narcissistic team owner in the league, spending millions upon millions of dollars on the once successful franchise while meddling in team affairs and ending up with a squad that seems to get worse every season. Few knew how petty and mean he was, however, until he was angered by an alternative media publication that published a reporter’s withering, exhaustive article last year, entitled “The Cranky Redskins Fan’s Guide to Dan Snyder”, cataloging the full range of Snyder’s non-feasance, misfeasance, malfeasance, and plain old bone-headedness over his career. Snyder’s lawsuit, filed this week in New York, claims that the article contained “numerous outrageous, false and defamatory statements of and concerning” Snyder. “Simply put,” it says, “no reasonable person would accept the publication of these types of false, malicious, and/or defamatory statements about them or their spouses. Nor would any reasonable person tolerate an anti-Semitic caricature of himself or herself prominently displayed on the front pages of a newspaper containing false and malicious allegations.”

The lawsuit is ridiculous on many levels, but mostly because it is a classic frivolous action. Continue reading →