Beau Elliot
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I suspect you were as astonished as I was when President Obama announced he would rename Mount McKinley.

Huh? you say. What’s a Mount McKinley?

McKinley is a mountain in Alaska, the highest in the U.S. (Go ahead, call me a geoscientist’s kid; I can take it.) It sits, or sprawls, or whatever it wants to do, more or less, in Denali National Park, a rather long way from being anchored down in Anchorage (to steal a line from a songwriter I once knew).

It was long known as Denali by the First Nation people in Alaska (the Athabascans, in case you wanted to know, or even if you didn’t), and Obama wants to return to that name.

The mountain was, according to NPR and USA Today, renamed by a gold miner named William Dickey in 1896 because Republican presidential candidate William McKinley of Ohio backed the gold standard. McKinley, not that anyone much remembers, became the 25th president and was assassinated in Buffalo in 1901 (by Leon Czolgosz, just in case you wanted to know). He was succeeded in office by a somewhat more famous person in U.S. history, Teddy Roosevelt.

So what’s in a name? you say, remembering a bit of Romeo and Juliet. Especially for a mountain. It’s interesting at this point to note that William McKinley never visited Alaska and thus never saw “his” mountain.

Ah, but this is the age of anything Obama does is some sort of socialist, twisted plot designed to bring America to its knees. Well, if a country can have knees. That’s still up for debate by scientists, like quantum spookiness. Yes, Virginia, there is something called quantum spookiness, which, according to Nature, just passed its toughest test yet. So it’s spookier than even the Trumpster.

Meanwhile, back at Obama and the mountain, while Alaskans generally support the change back to Denali (who wants a mountain named by a gold miner, anyway?), Ohioans are up in arms. (I’m still trying to picture Ohioans up in arms. Is that LeBron going in for a thunder dunk?)

Well, at least Ohio politicians are up in arms about the name change. For instance, House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio said, “There is a reason President McKinley’s name has served atop the highest peak in North America for more than 100 years, and that is because it is a testament to his great legacy.”

Not to be outdone, Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said, “This decision by the administration is yet another example of the president going around Congress.”

Well, to be fair to the senator, the name of the mountain has been debated in Congress for decades (thus proving it’s no molehill), and members of Congress from Ohio have blocked any name change for those decades.

Also not to be outdone, GOP presidential hopeful Ohio Gov. John Kasich contended that Obama had “overstepped his bounds.”

And Rep. Bob Gibbs, R-Ohio, complained that it was an example of Obama’s “constitutional overreach.”

Apparently, there’s a whole lot of “outdoing” sweeping the country, or at least Ohio. Maybe it’s like the flu.

Aren’t the Ohio lawmakers making a mountain into a molehill? Seems like. As if we didn’t have enough molehills running around already (not that molehills actually run, except late at night, when we can’t see them).

But at least Denali drew our attention away from quantum spookiness.