Harry Reid Won't Go To a Redskins Game Till They Change Their Name—What About the Nevada Rebels? The Las Vegas 51s?
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) rejected an invitation by the president of the Washington Redskins to come to a home game, an attempt to ease tensions, and in a letter to him said the name of the team was offensive and "disparaged the American people." The owner of the Redskins has vowed not to change the name of Washington's football team, even as the demand to change the name becomes the cause du jour for Washington liberals.
Reid, who rarely misses an opportunity to crassly demonize his political opponents, should know all about being offensive to the American people. As a senior senator who knows how to bring home the proverbial bacon, Reid's got quite a few things named after him, including a research facility at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas. Why isn't Harry Reid and the grievance train he came in on offended that he has a facility named after him at a school that uses a caricature of a Confederate soldier, the "Rebel," as its mascot?* Have symbols of the Confederacy stopped being offensive? Is the ego stroke that comes from having a facility named after him strong enough to inhibit his urge to be offended? Is Reid uninterested in picking a fight with a popular local institution where he has to keep winning elections?
For that matter, what about Las Vegas' Triple-A minor league baseball team? They're named the 51s, a reference to the government site Area 51 in Nevada. Their mascot is an alien, playing on the idea that the government is hiding the truth from Americans. Shouldn't Harry be offended? After all, he has lamented that the notion the government could lie or mislead the people makes his job (read: pushing his agenda) harder.
* Yes, in the 1970s the school officially disassociated the "Rebels" label from the Confederacy. Yet the school's "Hey Reb" mascot, created in 1983, wears a gray-colored hat and sports a mustache that looks kind of Confederate to me. He's still a rebel, anyway, so for Harry Reid the "independent mountain man" might as well be a Tea Party anarchist.