President Barack Obama recently changed the name of Mount McKinley in Alaska to its rightful name, Denali, to honor the state’s Native American population. However, white conservatives flew off the handle, denounced the change, and claimed that the president was waging war against white conservatives.
Going down the line of conservatives, Christian radio host Bryan Fischer, Karl Rove, and John Boehner, who, like McKinley, is from Ohio, have all sounded off against Obama’s renaming of Mount McKinley.
Here’s what Fischer had to say.
“Why would Obama do this?,” said Fischer. “Well, there’s a very simple reason: President McKinley was a Republican and he was American and he was white. So he was all the things that President Obama has such a visceral distaste for.”
Rove took a slightly tamer approach and said that Obama “ought to be more gracious” to McKinley. Then he said McKinley was “the guy who made it possible for [Obama] to be president.”
Boehner, the Republican House Speaker from Ohio, took it particularly personally that Obama changed the mountain’s name. He implied that Obama should have discussed the decision with the state’s residents first (as if they have any say in the matter).
“The Ohio delegation certainly didn’t hear about this from the president,” he said. “I’m certain he didn’t notify President McKinley’s descendants, who find this outrageous. Clearly this is a president who is not concerned with the deliberative process.”
