Nancy Pelosi, who was born in Baltimore in 1940, recently opined on the latest left wing cause, changing the name of the Washington Redskins.

Pelosi noted that when she was growing up in Baltimore, the city didn't have a football team.

"So one of the first songs I ever learned in my whole life was, 'Hail to the Redskins.' I didn't have the faintest idea what I was saying, but I've known it forever," she said.

For Baltimore football fans, given their rich history of triumph, loss and betrayal, Pelosi's statement is a ROTFLMAO howler. After all, from 1947-1950 Baltimore was home to the Baltimore Colts professional football team in the old All-American Football Conference.  Those Colts won only eleven games in four years before folding due to financial pressures.  

In 1953, when Pelosi was 13, the NFL formed a new team also named the Baltimore Colts.  In 1958, under famed quarterback Johnny Unitas, those Colts brought glory to Baltimore with a championship victory in perhaps the greatest NFL game ever played.  This nationally televised game that ended in a dramatic overtime victory marked the birth of professional football as a major national sport. Baltimore fans went wild with a huge crowd greeting the Colts on their return to the city. 

Then in 1969, Baltimore fans were stunned when the mighty Colts were upset by the upstart AFL New York Jets in Super Bowl III.  Two years later, Colts fans' world shifted when their team became part of the American Conference after the NFL and the AFL merged. 

Finally, in 1984, in a huge blow to municipal pride, the Colts snuck out of town in the middle of the night to find greener pastures in Indianapolis.  Baltimore was without a pro football team until 1996, when the Cleveland Browns became the Baltimore Ravens, a move that shocked Cleveland fans as much as the Colts' departure from Baltimore a dozen years earlier had shocked Charm City fans. 

Now some young women may have been oblivious to all the sports drama that occurred in their city while they were growing up, but Pelosi wasn't ordinary.  Her father was mayor of Baltimore from 1947 until 1959 when the Colts were being founded, and her brother was mayor from 1967 to 1971. Thomas D'Alseandro Jr. and Thomas D'Alesandro III both understood the value and prestige a professional sports team brings to a city.  

One of Tommy D'Alesandro's lasting legacies to Baltimore was the huge effort he made to restore major league baseball to that city in 1954 after a five decade long absence by getting the American League to approve of Bill Veek plan to move the St. Louis Browns to Baltimore.  (The New York Yankees actually began as the Baltimore Orioles in 1901, moving to New York as the Highlanders in 1903.) With a professional football team active in Baltimore for all but two years from the time his daughter Nancy was seven, it seems about as likely that "Hail to the Redskins" was heard around the D'Alesandro household as it would be to hear a member of Chicago's Daley claim they had grown up as fans of the Green Bay Packers. 
 
Why do politicians lie about such things?  Perhaps one reason is that the media never calls Democrats out on their self serving whoppers.