Members of the Oneida Indian Nation are demanding that the National Football League's Washington Redskins change the team's name to something less offensive to American Indians. Sportscaster Bob Costas calls the current nickname "an insult, a slur."
Following an announcement by Dan Snyder, who has owned the team since 1999, that he refuses to do any such thing, President Obama joined the fray, saying that if he owned a professional sports team and knew that its name "was offending a sizable group of people, I'd think about changing it."
Obama has better things to worry about -- and so do RG III and the Redskins, who have won just three games this season.
For starters, the U.S. Congress has not passed a single federal government budget on Obama's watch. And so, America has been poised on the edge of a "fiscal cliff" twice in the past year. Headlines about budget "sequesters," furloughs, partial government shutdowns and looming defaults on the federal debt have become routine.
The activation of new health insurance "exchanges," one of the centerpieces of the Affordable Care Act -- aka "Obamacare" -- was nothing short of disastrous. Glitches in the software program intended to provide information to consumers about the available insurance plans and premiums caused the entire system to crash. Weeks later there were still massive problems.
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NSA snooping of phone calls and emails both here and overseas, scandals at the IRS for holding up the applications of "tea party" groups seeking tax-
exempt status, looming fiscal train wrecks for Social Security and Medicare, and trillion-dollar budget deficits as far as the eye can see.
The economy still has not come anywhere close to recovering from the recent financial crisis. Unemployment remains unconscionably high, many employees are being shifted to part-time status so employers can avoid Obamacare's mandate and many others have stopped looking for jobs altogether.
And there's more. The Middle East is in flames, with civil war in Syria and bloody riots in Cairo. Iran still has nuclear ambitions.
By some accounts, "Redskins" was adopted by Washington's NFL team in 1933 to honor coach William "Lone Star" Dietz, whose mother was a Sioux.
PETA suggests keeping the team's nickname, but changing the team's logo from the profile of a feathered American Indian warrior to a red-skinned potato. That is about the level of seriousness this tempest in a teapot deserves.
William Shughart II is a senior fellow with the Independent Institute, Oakland, Calif., and J. Fish Smith Professor in Public Choice at Utah State University.
