Sure, you’d expect Ohioans to put up a bit of a fuss at the renaming of an Alaska mountain so as to remove the name of an Ohio president, William McKinley. But you wouldn’t expect it to be a serious pushback; Ohio has had a lot of presidents (eight to be exact) with a lot of stuff named after them.
And you sure wouldn’t expect the pushback to come from anyone else. The people who live where the mountain is have been trying to restore its old Alaskan name for forty years, frustrated strictly by threats of legislative action by Ohio members of Congress. This is totally a bipartisan issue for Alaskans. And while there may, perhaps, be a marginally legitimate argument about the Secretary of Interior’s authority to do this, it’s a really, really arcane one, and hardly a matter of Obama or his hirelings laughing at the law in their arrogance.
I got an especial kick today from Rep. Bob Gibbs calling the action “a political stunt.” Does he think Obama’s trying to win Alaska for Democrats in 2016? Maybe if a mountain war renamed after every swing voter….
Yet here we have Donald Trump and Mike Huckabee–so far–attacking the move and promising (Trump) or demanding (Huck) that it be stopped. There is zero plausible rationale other than hostility to Obama and all his infernal works. If it spreads, that will be incontestable.
