Mediaite reports that Keith Olbermann tried to link the recent Confederate flag debate to the tempest-in-a-teapot over the Washington Redskins' team name, asking why the two aren't equally as offensive and evocative of “evil.”
In a commentary about the ongoing lawsuit over the Redskins name, the former MSNBC host connected it to the hysteria over the Confederate flag in the wake of the Charleston church massacre, claiming it drove home “how evil mere symbols can be” and showed how a symbol “can not only invoke and encourage racism and violence and madness and murder and treason, but that it can do something worse, it can represent evil and represent genocide.”
Then he equated the two controversies morally:
And if a flag can do that, a football team name beamed into our homes every day, our headphones, our minds every day, it can represent the same kind of evil, the same kind of genocide, the same kind of persecution and mockery of a group of people because of the color of their skin.
