The Ben Tribbett era has ended in Washington. There was one?
The liberal blogger hired by owner Daniel Snyder to assist with the defense of the team’s name has resigned, according to the blogger-turned-lobbyist’s Twitter feed.
“So I’m going to send in my resignation to the Redskins,” Tribbett tweeted Monday night. “Hopefully that allows debate to move back to where it should be.”
The debate had migrated from the name to Tribbett, who rose to semi-prominence by pointing out that the brother of Washington president Bruce Allen had used a racial slur on the campaign trail in 2006. The inconsistency between Tribbett’s attack on George Allen for using the term “macaca” and Tribbett’s defense of the team name gained traction on Sunday, when it was shown via an archive of Tribbett’s blog that he had supported his position that “macaca” amounts to a slur by linking to a list that identifies both that term and “redskins” as racially offensive.
But the catalyst for the resignation possibly was the discovery by the Indian Country Today Media Network of a series of tweets posted by Tribbett while gambling in Las Vegas in 2010.
“An older native american guy just accused me of cheating and pulled some stuff out of his pocket to put some kind of spell on me,” Tribbett said. “Epic.”
Twenty-seven minutes later, Tribbett posted, “100 into 500. #curse fail.”
Then came the kicker, 14 minutes later: “Just took Chief for his last 300. I’d call it a scalping but that seems uncalled for.”
And so the Tribbett blink-of-an-eye hiring-and-resignation officially becomes the latest, and potentially the greatest, blunder committed by the franchise during the last two years, when the opposition to the name has been fueled in large part by the manner in which the team has opted to defend it.