Naming wrongs

 This is some winning streak the native inhabitants are on right now. And that's saying something, considering how the losses have piled up on them across the last 400 years.

First white Europeans killed them with white European diseases, and then their French allies got run off, and then it was Anthony Wayne and Andrew Jackson and Phil Sheridan and Custer (though the Native Inhabitants fixed his wagon). Pretty soon they'd been smallpoxed, swindled or slaughtered out of the whole darn country.

But they've sure been winning a lot of nickname fights lately.

A few years back they got the Cleveland Indians to drop the clearly racist Chief Wahoo caricature, and then they got Daniel Snyder, idiot owner of the Washington Native American Pejoratives, to drop the Pejorative (Redskins). Now the Indians have announced they will no longer be the Indians, either.

As it was with the Washington Football Team, this likely was a financial consideration rather than a crisis of conscience. A whole bunch of sponsors, and their sponsors, told Snyder they'd be shutting off the money tap if the team didn't do the decent thing and change that damn name. And suddenly, surprise, surprise, Daniel Snyder got religion.

You can bet something along those lines has happened in Cleveland, too. Money talks; offensive racial stereotyping walks.

Of course, this has provoked the usual howls of outrage from the usual mostly white folk -- including Our Only Available Outgoing President, who tweeted that the decision was "cancel culture." This has become the latest fetish term for folks like OOAOP, "political correctness" having become rather shopworn.

Nonetheless, it all amounts to the same thing: How dare they tell us we can't offend certain people anymore?

All the arguments this crowd advances, after all, essentially boil down to that. They just try to dress it up by saying we're Erasing History or, yes, Canceling Culture, or that naming athletic teams the Redskins or Braves or Indians was meant to honor them -- although in a remarkable number of instances, no one bothered to ask the native inhabitants what they thought about it.

Some would have been, and are, OK with it. But a whole heck of a lot more are not.

This being Trump's America, of course, that's their fault. In Trump's America, deliberately offending people is not a character flaw, nor does it mean you're a flaming horse's ass. It means you're strong and principled, and those who take offense are weak blubbering snowflakes.

In which case, the weak blubbering snowflakes just won another one.

Replacement names for the Indians are already out there, and range from the Spiders (the original Cleveland baseball team) to the Sockalexis (the native inhabitant in whose "honor" the Indians were originally named). Meaner suggestions would include the Fiery Cuyahogas, the Gosh Darn It When Will It Be Our Turns and, in honor of Cleveland's loss to the Cubs in the 2016 World Series, the Fightin' Rain Delays.

Excuse me. Make that the "Fightin' Bleeping-Bleep Rain Delays".

One thing's for sure. Whatever the Cleveland baseball honchos come up with, certain people will hate it.

And then they'll go out and buy the hats, the jerseys, the giant foam fingers.

God bless America.