I never liked that the Republicans renamed National Airport as Ronald Reagan National Airport. I guess we got a measure of revenge by naming the Baltimore-Washington Airport after Thurgood Marshall. But, if it’s true that Congress might strip Reagan’s name off, they should go one further. Name it after Jimmy Carter.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Nothing should be named after any president or other pol at least until all their private papers become public or they’ve been dead at least 50 years. But even the Reagan sickeningness pales compared to naming a building after the sick son of a bitch JE Hoover.
yeah, but those rules went out the window when we named everything in the world after JFK and RFK.
So we make an exception for the assassinated. Volunteers welcome.
Did we wait a decent interval before naming everything after your beloved Ike?
You like to overstate my admiration for Ike. He was one of the best president of the 20th-century, but that’s not saying much.
What’s named after Ike other than the Old Executive Office Building?
Thank goodness, not much that I’m aware of. Either because his last name is too long, or that damn fool naming of Earl Warren business …
Imo, he was judged about right at the time he left office and shortly thereafter, and should remain basically in the Average President category. Largely a do-nothing president who was politically positioned to do a great deal in positive ways, had he been so inclined, but who mostly was uninterested in governing and more interested in his golf game.
The Chicago part of Interstate something. Between that and the Reagan Memorial Highway it’s like tiptoeing through a minefield around here.
I’ll admit a piece of Interstate is appropriate, since he’s the one that lied us into it.
Well, you could have just as easily mentioned MLK along with the Kennedys.
And in his case, a federal holiday to boot, something neither Kennedy got.
Re the airport, there is some precedent for unnaming something for a revered deceased figure (though I predict that it won’t happen in the Reagan airport case).
Cape Canaveral was rather quickly renamed Cape Kennedy following Dallas but sometime in the 80s(?) someone decided it should revert to the old name, and the Kennedy family including (a probably privately disappointed) Jackie did not protest.
MLK was never elected to anything. I think the point was about naming stuff after people just because they were president (or even crummy secretaries of state).
Okay, fair enough. But I think the understandable desire to have a proper, seasoned long-term historical perspective on a public figure can hold just as well for the famous unelected.
Though it goes against our nature as a people to wait 50 yrs for that alleged proper perspective. We are as much emotional as rational beings, and so will tend to act when the iron is hot.
Just that, in Reagan’s case, all the ridiculous naming in his name has been the result of a one-sided highly partisan and aggressive PR campaign that took advantage, just as the Rs had written up in their game plan, of a wimpy Dem congressional caucus too eager to make political friends at the expense of confusing the historical record.
Dunno how Hoover’s name got on the bldg, but if there’s one candidate out there that’s ripe for an imminent unnaming, the Hoover FBI Bldg probably heads the list. Haven’t most of his bureau sychophants died off by now?
Like I always say, the FBI just hasn’t been the same since it lost its queen.
Looks like the Cape went back to Canaveral in 1973, as per a bill passed in FL, then okayed by the appropriate board at the US Interior Dep’t. Since the Space Center had also been renamed for JFK, no big deal there for the Kennedy family probably.
Since he pushed through the moonshot, JFK certainly had some valid claim to the Canaveral name. Reagan’s only claim to an airport is that he broke the air controller’s union.
Whoa! Talk about ironic.
Well, maybe not so much a claim to Canaveral, since JFK wasn’t responsible for its existence, but putting the Space Center there was Kennedy’s doing.
But I like your rational relation approach to naming sites provided the connection is a positive one. But with spineless rollover Dems in Congress, the outrages of the Reagan Airport and the Hoover FBI Bldg are what we end up with.
Unfortunately it sounds like just more wingnut whining about how we’re going to name everything after Hussein Obama after he takes our guns away and makes us be socialist Muslims who hate America. And a happy 4th to you too.
Well, if you really want to piss the Republicans off, name it the George McGovern National Airport.
That said, maybe it’d be better if we just called it the Washington National Airport and stopped using public facilities as billboards for the current ruling regime. Want to avoid naming it after a politician, even a legendary, universally revered one?
Call it the Martha Washington National Airport.
I’ve wondered why it is that pols get their names on anything, while more important people just get their names on their specialties. We get a Hubble telescope, a Grant Wood art center, probably a Florence Nightingale med center, but never an airport or park or big highway. The pols get all those even though when the history is written they will be seen to have accomplished little compared to the scientists, engineers, artists, and educators.
But then they don’t get to decide on the names, either. Could there possibly be any connection I wonder?
We have the Ronald Reagan Freeway (route 118) here in Los Angeles.