Friday column: What’s in a name? Osama knew

Before his recent departure into other realms, Osama bin Laden had thought that what his struggling terror corporation really needed was a good rebranding.

Al-Qaida al-Jihad — The Base of Holy War — was OK as far as it went; the problem was, it usually didn’t go that far. Lazy journalists with no respect for the difficulty of selecting a proper company moniker would stop with al-Qaida, so the godly rationale for wholesale slaughter of innocent people — The Base of Holy War — was entirely lost on an ignorant public.

Bin Laden had other problems, of course, not least the unhappy fact that most of al-Qaida’s victims were fellow Muslims.

As his company’s recent incendiary transactions have had much more success in Muslim lands than in the West, changing that reality would be most difficult.

Fortunately, there was a better option, one that any number of American CEOs could have recommended.

Just change the name.

When tobacco giant Philip Morris’ name became odious — also for killing people, incidentally — overnight the name became “Altria.” Philip Morris had come to be equated with lying and dying. But Altria not only is a meaningless, pleasant sound, it shares its first four letters with “altruistic.”

Good company. Nice company.

When Anderson Consulting was sadly linked with the corrupt accounting firm Arthur Anderson, from which it had spun off, it suddenly became “accenture.” Which also doesn’t mean anything but sure sounds swell.

So, bin Laden clearly would have been in good name-change company had he been able to pull the trigger, so to speak.

Alas, as SEAL Team Six beat him to it, we’ll never know if he would have gone with “Taifat al-Tawhed Wal-Jihad” (Monotheism and Jihad Group) or “Jama’at I’Adat al-Khilafat al-Rashida,” (Restoration of the Caliphate Group), two of the names he was brainstorming.

I would have suggested something like Beneficorp or Amiaco. In any case, I think it’s clear that the late “Sword of God” could have used a little marketing advice, no?

Now, admittedly, Dodgers owner Frank McCourt is not a terrorist, though I’m not sure you could convince most Los Angeles baseball fans of that. It is clear, however, that he, too, needs marketing help.

In seven years, he’s taken one of the premier names in all of sport and turned it into a laughingstock. After siphoning off at least $100 million from the team for his personal use and that of his equally profligate former spouse, McCourt’s credibility, like his team, is bankrupt.

The bad odor emanating from Chavez Ravine could take years to disperse, which means only one thing:

It’s time to rebrand.

In Brooklyn, before they became the Dodgers, the team was known as the Grooms, the Robins and the Superbas. McCourt could go back to one of those. Or, banking on popular player names from the past, he could call them the Koufaxes or the Robinsons.

But I’m afraid that wouldn’t do it either. Truth is, the only rebranding that will remove the stench attached to the name “Dodgers” is by changing two other words: those next to the word “owner.”

Contact Jim Gordon at gjames43@msn.com.