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OPINION

Costas To America: You're Just Not Smart Enough To Understand

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
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Bob Costas, just a few days after giving a cultural soliloquy during a halftime break regarding the murder/suicide of Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher, and the need to eradicate our society from guns, has managed to continue his elitist climb, claiming that the "audience" is to blame for the follow-up brouhaha about his comments.
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Like a good elitist, Costas is blaming his audience.

On the Sunday broadcast between the Cowboys and the Eagles, while quoting and paraphrasing an anti-guns creed from sports writer and wannabe 2nd Amendment Bon Vivant Jason Whitlock, Costas stated (amongst other things):

If he [Belcher] didn't possess/own a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins [the girlfriend] would both be alive today.

The problem here is two fold. First, Costas is clearly wrong. Belcher was 6'2" and weighed 228 pounds. He didn't need a gun to kill, he needed a horribly warped mind and some deep rooted trigger. In Wyoming, a man killed his father at a community college with a bow and arrow, then stabbed himself. A horrifying murder/suicide.

Didn't hear about it? That's because it doesn't fit the meme of a run-amok mainstream media. Only guns can kill. Everything else is proclaimed to be "not newsworthy."

Second, Costas, feeling the heat that comes from denigrating the 2nd Amendment and dissing the millions of law abiding gun owners in America, came out with an apology....kind of. He stated that: (emphasis mine)

Maybe I gave the audience too much credit , but I said, ‘if you’re looking for perspective, a bit of it can be found’ — and my implication there — with every second counting; I had maybe 50 seconds total for this — my implication was ‘a bit of perspective, here’s one aspect of it,” he also said. “My mistake there was that I left it open to too much misinterpretation.”
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The audience is to blame? The audience wasn't smart enough to "get it?" Why are the shameful rantings of Costas the fault of the audience? You never hear a comic blame the audience for not laughing. I mean, I guess you could, but then they wouldn't be a comic, now would they? They'd be your drunk uncle on Thanksgiving wondering why no one like his "pull my finger" routine.

This is "The Costas Conjecture." The belief held by Costas that what he does is fine, and if you don't like it it's because you just don't get it. You simpleton.

Who else uses "The Costas Conjecture?" President Obama does. Since he took office, the White House, and the mainstream media, have been issuing statements to better explain the positions, policies and beliefs that President Obama, in his own words, could not properly explain. Like when Press Secretary Jay Carney had to explain the President's bizarre take on the authority of the Supreme Court. According to Carney:

...the president was not clearly understood by some people because he is a law professor, he spoke in shorthand.

Translation: The Audience is the problem. Or when the campaign worried that Obama's problem was that he was just "too professorial" to resonate with voters. Translation: The Audience is the problem. The Los Angeles Times lamented in May, 2012 that President Obama
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may be too brainy to be president. Translation: Yes. The Costas Conjecture.

The firing of Costas is left up to his employer. Certainly, NBC sees a value in left-leaning hosts on their sportscasts. If Keith Olbermann was still in the employ of NBC, I have little doubt that we would be engaging this same conversation.

But Costas made two mistakes that at the same time are obscene and truly unforgivable. He used his position as a sportscaster to make an unbridled attack on the Second Amendment, and he followed it up by blaming the audience for not being with him. It not only makes him wrong, it makes him petty.

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