Mike Ditka has had enough with the campaign to get the Washington Redskins to drop its racially charged name.
Ditka, who made the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a player and won a Super Bowl as a head coach, unloaded on critics of the team’s name during a recent interview with RedskinsHistorian.com.
The politically conservative Ditka, who bragged last year that he could have beaten Barack Obama in Illinois’ 2004 U.S. Senate race, ripped the “liberals” who have lobbied for a name change and expressed solidarity with Redskins owner Daniel Snyder, who has repeatedly said he won’t change the name.
“What’s all the stink over the Redskin name?” Ditka said in the interview, which was posted Thursday. “It’s so much horse shit it’s incredible. We’re going to let the liberals of the world run this world. It was said out of reverence, out of pride to the American Indian. Even though it was called a Redskin. What are you going to call them, a Proudskin? This is so stupid it’s appalling, and I hope that owner keeps fighting for it and never changes it, because the Redskins are part of an American football history, and it should never be anything but the Washington Redskins. That’s the way it is.”
“Its been the name of the team since the beginning of football,” he continued. “It has nothing to do with something that happened lately, or something that somebody dreamed up. This was the name, period. I mean, leave it alone. I mean, these people are silly — asinine, actually, in my opinion.”
Facing mounting criticism aimed at the name, Snyder’s PR efforts have been dodgy at times. In May, the team encouraged fans on Twitter to deluge Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), an outspoken critic of the name, with a pro-Redskins hashtag, but the effort backfired.
About a month later, the team hired liberal blogger Ben Tribbett to help stave off criticism of the name, only to see him quit weeks later after a website unearthed some tweets in which he made derogatory remarks about a Native American.
Around the same time that the team hired Tribbett, the United States Patent and Trademark Office announced that it had cancelled six of the Redskins’ trademark registrations because they “were disparaging to Native Americans at the respective times they were registered.”
Ditka isn’t the only one who considers the name a tribute to Native Americans. Joe Thiesmann, a former Super Bowl-winning quarterback for the Redskins, made a similar point last year.
“I was very proud to play for the Washington Redskins, and I did it to honor Native people in that regard,” Theismann said. “I think sometimes people perceive words in their own particular way.”
You missed the part where he apparently said “we’ve already got one guy trying to change the Constitution” during this tirade.
Yeah, what part, Idiot Mike…and what guy?
Mike still pines for the days he used to eat at Sambo’s too…of course he ate there with complete respect as well.
Ditka is an appropriate name for this moron (as a Packer fan we would yell during the games; Mike’s a Dick) although Butkus might be more appropriate cause he can kiss mine.
Maybe what this really proves I that it is better to be a Packer fan as Lombardi would have made short work of such an ignorant man.
Why in the world would anyone give this astoundingly ignorant man a soapbox to spew his hate? He was born “Michael Dyczko” (Ukrainian). Yet his family felt it was important to change it to “Ditka”. Fine. But when there is an offensive name that ought to be changed, Mike goes full Teabagger and lazily blames “liberals”.
“We’re going to let the liberals of the world run this world.”
Now you’re getting it. You RWNJ don’t want to compromise, you don’t want to participate. You want to shut down the government because you got resoundingly punked by Obama. You lost and you can’t get over it. OK, then you are going to get run by the liberals. Cry louder please.