Renaming Old Dixie for Obama a dead-end idea

Frank Cerabino Council voted on Wednesday night to change the name of a section of Old Dixie Highway to Barack Obama Highway. The county still has to approve the name change.

“I appreciate the thought,” Obama should say. “But get back to me when you find another street, one that’s a bit more upbeat.”

The would-be Barack Obama Highway is a lunar landscape of neglect, weeds, and vacant land. It’s not a place where you want to be.

The good intentions of the Riviera Beach City Council is doing nothing but serving up a ready-made metaphor for the vast right-lane conspiracy of Obama haters.

Within a few years, they’ll have rewritten the history of the road, pretending that Old Dixie Highway used to be a prosperous, thriving slab of county real estate until the stultifying, jobs-killing, King Obama tyrannically dipped into the Saul Alinsky playbook to steal the road for his own glory.

It will be an “honor” that’s more trouble than it’s worth.

Especially since getting rid of a piece of Old Dixie Highway just invites another round of pointless braying from the Confederate-flag-waving “heritage” brigade, a small local contingent of imaginative grievance seekers who don’t like Obama, anyway.

“Keep looking,” Obama ought to advise the county. “What’s available in Palm Beach?”

If Riviera Beach wants to rename Old Dixie Highway after an American president, they’d be doing Obama a bigger favor if they changed the name to “Avenue Dubya.”

A good indication that the would-be Barack Obama Highway is no prize in Riviera Beach, is the fact that it would intersect at one point with Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

The slain civil rights leader, an American hero who devoted his life to the nonviolent pursuit of justice, regrettably has become the name-

sake of some of America’s most violent streets, as comedian Chris Rock has observed.

“I don’t give a (expletive deleted) where you are in America, if you’re on Martin Luther King Boulevard, there’s some violence going down,” Rock has said on stage. “You can’t call nobody and tell them you’re lost on MLK. ‘I’m lost and I’m on Martin Luther King.’ “Run! Run! Run!” Obama needs a break here. He has already been saddled with a dubious local honor.

South Bay City Manager Corey Alston pleaded guilty last year to grand theft for using his city-issued American Express card for personal expenses with reckless abandon.

Alston ended his South Bay job with an ankle monitor and a court order to repay the city $48,000.

But because Florida lawmakers are in such a rush to dismantle traditional public schools, Alston’s felony conviction for stealing tax money did not disqualify him for continuing to receive tax dollars to operate his two charter schools in Broward County.

He named one of them The Obama Academy for Boys. Broward County shut down his Obamanamed school down last year for — surprise! — failing to justify how it spent the tax dollars it received.

A recent State Auditor General report found that taxpayers may be out about $1.8 million from Alston’s closed charter schools, the Sun-Sentinel reported this week.

Thanks, Obama Academy for Boys!

See what I mean? Obama has already been “honored” enough around here.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” he should tell Riviera Beach. “I don’t need any more problems.”