Bob Costas: Gee, Maybe My Twenty Second Easy-Bake Gun Control Screed Wasn't Appropriate

Really.

Bob Costas said he made a “mistake,” violating his own rule of not trying to compress a nuanced topic into small bit of air time, with his controversial halftime commentary Sunday night on the murder-suicide committed by Jovan Belcher of the Kansas City Chiefs the day before.

“My mistake is I left it open for too much miscommunication,” Costas said in a lengthy interview on “The Dan Patrick Show.” The 90-second weekly spot, he said, doesn’t offer enough time in which to adequately discuss the issue of “the football culture, the gun culture, domestic violence.”

...

Costas felt the heat for his comments immediately on Twitter and in lengthier criticism Monday, when some were calling for NBC to fire him.

“There are reasonable disagreements, and I respect that. But then there are things that come from every angle, where you just have to say to yourself ‘sometimes the quality of the thinking of those who oppose you speaks for itself.’ I was told — I didn’t see it — that someone compared this as a fire-able offense to situations in which people have made blatantly racist comments, or comments that had no place whatsoever,” Costas said.

“This is simply a case of: some people don’t agree with it, or they don’t agree with what they think I was saying, and therefore, it would be okay if I was booted off the air … ‘let’s fire everybody we don’t agree with.’ It’s just absurd.”

It's not actually that absurd to me. My problem is hijacking a nonpartisan sports broadcast to engage, yet again, in partisan political commentary. No one would have a problem -- at least not a "Fire Him!" level problem -- if Costas pitched a gig where he'd do some political commentary in a political show.

The problem, as usual, is these Frustrated Liberal Sages -- frustrated that they don't have enough influence over the public to push their liberal views -- using a nonpolitical perch to push the same goddamn liberal message.

By the way, the minute a conservative does anything like this the Outrage!!! trembles throughout the liberal world and they demand a firing... and damnit if they don't get a firing 90% of the time.

So that's the problem -- Costas can do this, but no conservative-minded person can. If the conservative minded person says anything political, he gets fired.

If Costas does it, nothing happens, and then he gets to pretend how "absurd" it is to propose firing a man for his political speech.

Happens all the time. Just doesn't happen to liberals.

The problem, Costas, is that liberals are using their domination over major institutions to treat conservatives and liberals differently -- liberals as a privileged class, conservatives as second-class (or worse) citizens -- and we're sick to death of it.

posted by Ace at 07:15 PM

| Access Comments