Kent Bush: What else could President Obama rename?

It seems like President Barack Obama is just having fun making people mad lately.

Earlier this week, he announced that he is changing the name of Mount McKinley in Alaska back to Denali.

Obama is going to Alaska and since they didn’t have any good golf courses, he was looking for something fun to do so he decided to rename a mountain.

Of course, the President the mountain was named for about century ago never went to Alaska so I guess Obama can at least say he has been there in that way. William McKinley hadn’t even been elected yet when a prospector started calling America’s tallest peak by his name.

After he won the White House, the name stuck.

Celebrities and athletes have long been making news by renaming themselves. Sean Combs (Puff Daddy, Puffy, P-Diddy etc.) Prince Roger Nelson (Prince, some symbol that isn’t on my keyboard), Lew Alcindor (Karim Abdul Jabbar), Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali), Ron Artest (Metta World Peace) and others have changed their public identities.

But mountain names are usually more secure.

All mountains had names long before white people “discovered” them and renamed them. Obama says he is just taking the mountain back to its native Alaskan name.

So Obama renamed a mountain, what else could he rename?

Chicago has two airports. O’Hare is solid, but Midway could easily become Obama International. All of the flights could include menus of super healthy and horrible tasting foods and free healthcare in the air. That would secure his legacy with Obamacare and his wife’s legacy for ruining school lunches across our great – and somewhat plump – land.

He really should rename West Virginia. It has always bothered me that part of regular Virginia is further west than the westernmost part of West Virginia. The state is made up of counties that did not want to secede and join the Confederacy. That is a great heritage.

But when they named it, the only other option that received serious consideration was Kanawha.

I wouldn’t go with Kanawha. But why couldn’t they have chosen North Virginia or New Virginia? Those would have worked much better cartographically. West Virginia makes American geography as confusing as the language with “I before E except after C” and other rules that only apply about half of the time.

Until this weekend when the announcement was made, not many people in the world cared about President McKinley or Mount McKinley. Even the head of the McKinley Presidential Library said he was just glad people were learning about and paying more attention to the former President. However, Obama announcing the name change spurred a lot of interest from the anti-Obama crowd.

I think there should be more backlash.

Daimler Chrysler should respond by renaming the Dodge Denali the Dodge McKinley. They could even put eyelashes on the headlights like some people do with their Volkswagen Beetles. I bet they would sell a ton of them in Ohio.

It is hard to argue that the name shouldn’t be changed back to Denali when the reasons for changing the name in the first place were so suspect.

However, the move certainly added some interest to the President’s weekly schedule.