Democrat Majority Leader Senator Harry Reid (NV) is now using the NBA’s punishment of Clippers owner Donald Sterling as another excuse to attack the NFL for not banning the use of the team name “Redskins,” calling the moniker a “tradition of racism.”
Never one to let a good scandal go to waste without trying to exploit it, Reid once again attacked Redskins owner Daniel Snyder for refusing to change his team’s name.
“It’s untoward for Daniel Snyder to hide behind ‘tradition,'” Senator Reid said from the floor of the U.S. Senate on Wednesday. “What tradition? The tradition of racism.”
Reid claimed NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell “fails to show any leadership” by allowing Redskins owner Snyder to keep the name.
The Nevada Senator continued by stating, “How long will the NFL continue to do nothing, zero, as one of its teams bears a name that inflicts so much pain on Native Americans?”
“I say to commissioner Roger Goodell remove this hateful term from your league’s vocabulary and rid the league of racism and bigotry,” Reid demagogued.
This has been a familiar theme from Reid, who has repeatedly attacked Snyder over the team’s name.
Of course, this is the same Senator Reid who in 2008 said that Barack Obama was a good “light-skinned” black man who was able to speak with “no negro dialect.”
Reid’s own racist remark recently caused ESPN’s Robert Smith to wonder why no one was trying to throw Harry Reid out of the Senate for his racist comments.
“Where was all this outage when [S]enator Harry Reid talked about Obama only using the ‘negro dialect’ when he wanted to?” Smith said on Twitter on April 27.
Washington congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton also used the Sterling incident to attack the NFL over the Redskins name.
Norton insists that forcing Snyder to dump his team name isn’t about the First Amendment. “This is about branding, whether you can use a brand that disparages an ethnic group,” Norton claimed.
Snyder, Norton said, is a man “who refuses to recognize the sensibilities of American Indians.”
One wonders if Harry Reid and Norton are ready to demand that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren cease dishonoring Native Americans by her continued false claims that she herself is of Native American ancestry?
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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