A Principled Attack? Hardly

As I’ve mentioned before, there are a gaggle of liberal sportswriters who want to feel like they’ve caused some great civil rights movement. But with black coaches and quarterbacks aplenty and gays in the temple, what’s left? Well, the horribly racist “Redskin” name, that's what! Queue a flood of self-righteous articles about the indignity that anyone in America would dare use such a slur. Well, now they have a problem and that has exposed all their grand proclamations of principle as nothing more than hypocrisy. Typical.

The primary loser beating this tom-tom has been West Virginia lawyer trash Mike Florio, who leveraged insider information from agents into a rumor site that NBC bought to gain an online presence. Florio is paranoid and beyond conspiratorial, almost always wrong, and he's a real ass. He’s Perez Hilton in hillbilly garb. He’s also a massive liberal and he applies all the usual liberal arguments. Here are his key arguments, i.e. the principles he claims must be applied:

● If anyone is offended by a word, then the rest of us have an obligation to conform our behavior to the desires of those people and we must stop using the "offensive" word. Remember this "principle" because it will be key.

● You can’t play the numbers game in an instance like this, because this is about right and wrong. All it takes is one person being offended to require a change. This is how he gets around the problem that the public supports the Redskin name by a 9-1 margin, and he's actually attacked people who claim we should do what the “vast majority” of the public wants. He claimed that (1) 80%+ cannot be considered “a vast majority” (yeah, he said that) and (2) this isn’t about polls, this is about right and wrong, so arguing majority rules is immoral.

● The fact that most people don’t consider this offensive isn’t relevant, because some people do and that is enough to require action. This is how he avoids the problem that a number of teams still use the name, including at least one team on an American Indian reservation. Notice that each of these first three points is the same point restated differently.

● Next, he plays the race card by dismissing the opinions of all those who aren’t American Indian because their opinions are per se inferior to American Indians on this issue. Basically, in his world, each race gets special treatment and a different set of rules. Further, he makes himself the judge of what these people may believe. Indeed, when American Indians agree with the whites, Florio either (1) dismisses them as not genuine Indians or (2) he dismisses them as out of touch or duped. He’s also gone back and smeared the various American Indians who were involved in choosing the Redskin name or logo by questioning (without evidence) their claim to being American Indians. Essentially, Florio takes the position that there is only one opinion Indians may have, and Florio has appointed himself as the man who will give it to them.

● To bolster his case, he highlights every single person who agrees with him as a way to avoid the damning statistical polls, and he never mentions anyone who disagrees with him except for Redskin employees, who he claims are saying what they have been told to say. He also points to his own articles as proof that the public is buzzing about this issue.

Got it? If a single angel cries, then all us devils must change because this is a matter of principle and the principle is determined by the idiosyncratic beliefs of the group doing the whining. It does not matter that no one else sees this as a slur or that the vast majority of the public is on the other side. All that matters is that someone feels aggrieved.

Simple. . . and false. Observe.

Last week, one of the whiners in the anti-Redskin movement made the comment that the Kansas City Chiefs better change their name too, because she considered that just as offensive.

BAM! In races Florio to slam the Chiefs, right? Actually, no. See, all those principles Florio spews against the Redskins apparently aren’t principles after all. Indeed, they don’t apply with the Chiefs because “[t]here are fundamental differences between the Chiefs and the Redskins, especially that dictionaries define ‘chief’ as a term of respect and ‘redskin’ as a slur.” In other words, society doesn’t see chief as an insult, so it doesn’t matter to Florio that this whiner is upset by that word. Do you see the problem? His entire anti-Redskin argument is premised on the idea that if one person is offended, then that is enough. What society wants is irrelevant. But when it comes to the Chiefs, Florio suddenly claims the word needs to be objectively seen as offensive by society before this can be considered an issue. If that’s true, then doesn’t the fact that the public supports the Redskin name and doesn’t see it as offensive by a 9-1 margin pretty much neuter Florio’s argument against that name? Of course it does, but he’s a liberal and he doesn’t care about consistency.

What he’s done is take his own prejudices and turn them into objective reality. He sees the word “Redskin” as offensive and thus, he wants it banned and he comes up with broad ranging "principles" to support his argument and dismiss the desires of the public. On the other hand, he does not see the word “Chiefs” as offensive and thus he rejects the idea that it should be banned, even as that contradicts every one of the broad principles he uses to support his attack on the Redskins. Basically, his principles apply only when he agrees with the outcome they would cause. So much for principles.

So much for the public too. Like most liberals, he only cares what the public thinks when the public agrees with him. Notice also that he’s not speaking for an aggrieved people as he proudly claims, he’s using them to get his own prejudices made a matter of public policy. In other words, they are worth protecting only so long as their desires are consistent with his.

Interestingly, since Amanda Blackhorse said this last week about the Chiefs, Florio has run ZERO articles about the Chiefs and their name. Yet, at the same time, he continues to run attacks on the Redskins using the same false logic he won’t apply to the Chiefs.

Finally, I guess it’s worth pointing out too that once again, when you are dealing with the permanently aggrieved, they cannot be placated. No concession will ever be enough. Give them Redskins, they will demand Chiefs. Give them Chiefs, they'll demand something else. Any concession is just encouragement for them to try the next leg of their journey.