Politics Ain’t Beanbag

I live in Red State Montana where Mitt Romney crushed Barack Obama like a worm.

So if you are interested in reconciling how a vulnerable Democrat incumbent like Senator Jon Tester could manage to win re-election over well-qualified Republican challenger Denny Rehberg, read this.

To paraphrase one of the commenters, Tester won because he’s a lying creep (but he’s their lying creep).

It’s almost as if there’s a vast left-wing conspiracy.

The left’s full-on hypocrisy

When the right critiques Broncobama for his dismal record, his idiotic ideas, and his failed policies, the media left has an answer: it’s racism.

When the left practices true racial hatred, as in South Carolina Rep. Tim Scott being appointed by Gov. Nikki Haley to the Senate seat now held by Jim DeMint, the media left has another answer: crickets.

We suspect the media left has a secret purification ceremony that’s known by a different name in larger society. It’s called having a lobotomy.

Searching for blame in Newtown

The search for blame goes on regarding the mass murder in Newtown, CT. Does the search for blame matter?

It depends how you look at it. While the search for blame will matter little (at this point) for the surviving victims and to the friends and family of the murdered victims, in the end, this search for blame matters greatly to all of us.

Why? Because senior politicos will feel the pressure to do something. The pressure to do something comes from the media and other like-thinking politicos who would infringe on basic rights and abuse our due process in order to satisfy their own egos and quest for power. After all, they’ll tell us (in so many words), it’s for your own good.

Whether it’s restricting your freedom to buy Big Gulps and fast food, to smoke, to avoid eating fruits and vegetables, to practice your religion, or to say things others disagree with, our “elites” will gladly restrict our freedoms. Why? It’s their nature; that’s what they do.

In the mean time, there’s much to ponder. Why did the murderer’s mother take him to the shooting range, training him in lethal practices, and also providing access to substantial firepower? Where was the murderer’s father? Why aren’t sociopaths/psychopaths like the murderer in places where they can’t hurt others? Why does the media provide such inordinate attention and get so much wrong with such events? Why do schools (and other locales that have been the victims of mass murderers) unilaterally disarm and self-remove the ability to protect themselves?

Concurrently, our “elites” either 1) deny that human evil exists (they’ll say it’s a chemical imbalance or a brain tumor or failed parenting or society’s fault or the likes, Adolph Hitler and Timothy McVeigh excluded… while the same “elites” tell us abortion is not evil—it’s a right) or 2) they feel they can legislate human evil out of existence, again, even if it restricts our freedoms, it’s for your own good.

History shows us human evil and the human condition can’t really be separated.

It’s a fallen world—full of evil and with human righteousness that’s as filthy rags—and we’re just living it it.

Pray for all those affected by this heinous crime.

Liberal code on gun control

When the left says it’s time to talk about gun control, here’s what it means: it’s time for gun control.

Remember, the left believes in the “living-breathing” constitution, meaning there are no enduring truths or realities. 

The questions of Newtown

Please pray for the surviving victims and the families of the victims of the tragic mass-murder in Newtown, Ct.

And after you’ve prayed, consider the following:

• Why is it these murderers do their horrific acts and then off themselves? Why don’t they just commit suicide and spare everyone else the grieving and pain?
• Why is it that criminals ignore and evade gun-control laws?
• Why is it these murderers go places where they’ll be largely—or completely—unopposed by citizenry who are exercising the right to bear arms? (Perhaps because the madman’s goal is to inflict maximal mayhem—but why?—and he still possesses plenty of rationality.)
• Why is it these criminals are men, usually young men?
• Is Michael Bloomberg the most predictable anti-gun/anti-free speech/anti-freedom troll in America?
• Has mental illness been sufficiently wished away or thought to be medicated away so as to let dangerous citizens walk the streets?
• Since a man knifed 22 people at a school in China, will the Chinese Communist Party be talking about new knife controls?
• Should parents consider both homeschooling and concealed carry to the maximum extent practical?

Now that you’ve pondered such things, please keep praying. Thanks.

‘He may be an illegal alien sex offender, but he’s my illegal alien sex offender’

Does the rule of law hold sway with the Obama Administration? Or with Senator Bob Menendez, D-NJ?

Not if you believe the emerging tale about Luis Abrahan Sanchez Zavaleta.

And who is the aforementioned man of four names?

Luis Abrahan Sanchez Zavaleta, an 18-year-old Peruvian illegal alien employed as an unpaid intern in one of the offices of Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., is a registered sex offender: “The Homeland Security Department instructed federal agents not to arrest him until after Election Day, a U.S. official involved in the case told the AP.”

… Local New Jersey officials “notified ICE agents in early October that they suspected Sanchez was an illegal immigrant who was a registered sex offender and who may be eligible to be deported,” AP’s Caldwell reported. “ICE agents in New Jersey notified superiors at the Homeland Security Department because they considered it a potentially high profile arrest, and DHS instructed them not to arrest Sanchez until after the November election, one U.S. official told the AP.”

According to the AP, “ICE officials complained that the delay was inappropriate, but DHS directed them several times not to act, the official said.”

First off, not even Senator John Blutarsky would be part of such an indiscretion. Second, Sanchez only may be eligible to be deported?

And beyond that, ponder Benghazi, Fast and Furious, and now Interngate… if these involved Republicans, they’d be bigger than Watergate.

Why Rob Parker went full retard

Rob Parker, why so full retard?

Why did ESPN talking head Rob Parker go full retard with regard to RG III, AKA Bobby Three Sticks, AKA Robert Griffin III?

First, let’s take a step back and look at what Parker said:

“Is he a brother, or is he a cornball brother,” Parker asked. “I keep hearing these things. We all know he has a white fiancée. There was all this talk about he’s a Republican.”

Parker’s questioning of whether or not RGIII was “one of us” even made Stephen A. Smith a little squeamish.

Well, there’s much to unpack here. Since Broncobama has a white mother, what’s that make him? This really brings into question whether Barry is down with the cause (whatever the cause is). And if Steven A. Smith is the voice a reason, is that an indication of how far ESPN has fallen? But back to the topic at hand, that is, what explains Parker’s racist idiocy?

First, ESPN has multiple channels and a lot of air time to fill, leading to fools like Parker getting an opportunity in the first place. So is it ESPN, the worldwide leader in sports or is it ESPN, looking for eyeballs at any cost/show me the money, or perhaps ESPN, often wrong but never in doubt? Answer: yes.

Next, sports reporting is a low form of “journalism.” As evidence, consider the usual suspects, Bob Costas, Peter King, Jay Mariotti, Steven A. Smith, Skip Bayless, Peter Gammons, Jason “Nit” Whitlock, Rick Riley, et al. There are exceptions (Joe Posnanski) that prove the rule, but the rule is the rule.

Third, Andy Warhol was a prophet. Parker needed his fifteen minutes of fame.

Finally, there’s a flagrant double standard coming from the left (politicos, media-types, other “elites”) which simply doesn’t demand that one of their own be condemned for idiotic behavior. This double standard keeps people like Parker from suffering the consequences of their idiocy. Are sports “journalists” generally on the left? Of course. They’re a reflection of the media world from which they’re drawn from (and drawn to).

Consider the non-sports flip side. Tea Party non-riots and peaceful demonstrations? An outrageous fascist disgrace! Union thugs committing felonies in Michigan or Wisconsin? Crickets.

Is Parker really a good man who just lost his way for a moment? Doubtful. Is he a bomb-throwing pseudo-provocateur who accidently revealed more of his personal thoughts than he intended? More probable. Just like Sean Penn, 2001, in I am Sam.

Obamaworld: Total Information Awareness program on Steroids, EPO, and Growth Hormone

Isn’t it interesting that when the Total Information Awareness program was shut down, it was due to a great media outcry over devious government intrusion, spying, and constitutional violations?

And now that things have gotten far worse… crickets. (Crickets, at least as compared to the outrage TIA generated.)

Or to summarize: four legs good, two legs Bush (and also consider that some Presidents are more equal than others).

The bumper-sticker summary of what’s going on:

The [new record-gathering] rules now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them…

Now, NCTC can copy entire government databases—flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others…

The changes also allow databases of U.S. civilian information to be given to foreign governments for analysis of their own…

“It’s breathtaking” in its scope, said a former senior administration official familiar with the White House debate.

But to paraphrase from Some Like It Hot, aren’t there laws, conventions, and traditions against such things? There are, but they’re toothless (and ignored).

…the Federal Privacy Act allows agencies to exempt themselves from many requirements by placing notices in the Federal Register, the government’s daily publication of proposed rules. In practice, these privacy-act notices are rarely contested by government watchdogs or members of the public. “All you have to do is publish a notice in the Federal Register and you can do whatever you want,” says Robert Gellman, a privacy consultant who advises agencies on how to comply with the Privacy Act.

Broncobama wants us to have personal freedom and to keep the government out of our bedrooms homes. Surely he would never lead America down such an Orwellian path… would he?

To fix problems like these that had cropped up since the [2009 underwear-bomber] Abdulmutallab incident, NCTC proposed the major expansion of its powers that would ultimately get debated at the March meeting in the White House. It moved to ditch the requirement that it discard the innocent-person data. And it asked for broader authority to troll for patterns in the data.

Well, it’s all for our own good, right? And it makes us safer… right? (Emphasis added.)

At the Department of Justice, Chief Privacy Officer Nancy Libin raised concerns about whether the guidelines could unfairly target innocent people, these people said. Some research suggests that, statistically speaking, there are too few terror attacks for predictive patterns to emerge. The [real] risk, then, is that innocent behavior gets misunderstood—say, a man buying chemicals (for a child’s science fair) and a timer (for the sprinkler) sets off false alarms.

An August government report indicates that, as of last year, NCTC wasn’t doing predictive pattern-matching.

So we’re left with this question: why does the Obama Administration spy on its citizens? The answer is it’s for the very same reason the Administration pursues its other failing progressive (progressive is code for totalitarian) policies. Because it can.

Liberal triple play fail of the day

Leftists, be they journalists, economists, or especially politicos don’t understand the world, nor do many ever willingly open their eyes.

First case in point, Broncobama on Michigan voting to become a right-to-work state:

But President Obama, ever the demagogue of dishonesty, took to the stump Monday in Redford, Mich., claiming the measure takes “away your right to bargain for better wages and working conditions.” That‘s a shameful lie from a shameless president who regularly affirms his shamelessness with such deceit.

And despite the blinders worn by so many, the evidence is clear that right-to-work laws benefit companies, their employees and their states‘ coffers.

The left fails to understand that the economy—and just about everything else—responds to all sorts of inputs (including idiotic “inputs” like forcing people to join unions and involuntarily pay union dues) by taking action. “Action” in such a case includes things like building automobile plants in Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia (among others) where labor costs are lower.

But it seems the left would rather see car building in Michigan go the way of the Edmund Fitzgerald. (I thought libs were mainly secular humanists, with Charles Darwin as one of their gods; if so, why can’t they see right-to-work as a case of economic adapt or die? The answer is pride: they foolishly think they can write self-beneficial laws, practice crony capitalism, and have a centrally managed economy that works. History disagrees.)

Second, it seems there is great progressive angst and gnashing of teeth when libs hear Google has routed $10 billion in profits through a Bermuda sub-headquarters in order to avoid paying about $3.5 billion in taxes to Uncle Sugar. Avoiding taxes is legal, evading taxes is what brought Al Capone down (that and syphilis). Google is making a rational response to maximize their company’s financial power and it turns out Google is just the tip of the iceberg:

J.P. Morgan JPM +1.15% estimates that American companies currently hold a cool $1.7 trillion in profits outside the U.S. They keep them there because if they brought them home, they’d be taxed at 35%. Hewlett-Packard HPQ +1.47% has told its shareholders that “substantially all of HP’s total cash balances are held outside the U.S.” Two-thirds of Apple’s $121 billion in cash is held outside the U.S. Most other multinationals can tell a similar story, and a substantial number hold those profits in subsidiaries based in Bermuda.

(A cool $1.7 trillion? Just think: that could cover a whole year of the Obamanomics driven Obamadeficit.)

When liberals avoid paying taxes, they shrug it off as “something everyone does.” When an American-based company does the same, libs go apoplectic (and imagine if it had been Wal-Mart). Want to drive these now-American companies towards an ever-greater overseas presence? Keep writing laws that induce them to do just that.

Finally, lefties fail to see that by removing barriers to competition, jobs and wages should both increase. It’s a basic reflection of supply and demand, and if there were fewer impediments to starting a business, there might just be more business and more employment options available to workers. But in our regulatory state, a place of ever-increasing larding on of new legislation, who will be willing to fight city hall, county governments, state governments, the Department of Labor, the EPA, et al.?

We don’t really know the answer to that, but all else being equal, we can reasonably say fewer entrepreneurs will emerge when government builds such barriers to competition. That means fewer entrepreneurs which means fewer start-ups and small businesses and that’s where most jobs are created (except in today’s environs where most jobs created are government jobs and don’t create value nearly commensurate with their costs).

Instead America is stuck with—by its own choice—an Executive who appears to understand nothing about basic economics (or for that matter, truth), supported by a mainstream court-eunuch media who is dedicated to this Executive, madly (and angrily) scribbling economists who are out of their depth and deny reality, politicos with fatal levels of hubris and self-deception. Mistakes have consequences and that’s why the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Guns or alcohol?

Bob Costas, sports “journalist” (yes, those are sneer quotes) offers that if Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.

Will Costas now offer that if Dallas Cowboy Josh Brent didn’t have alcohol, his teammate Jerry Brown would be alive today?

Or maybe if Josh Brent didn’t have a car?

Or maybe if we weren’t born, we wouldn’t have to die?

There are tragedies in life but the things human beings use (guns, drugs, vehicles, etc.) are not to blame. People are to blame. That’s what happens in a fallen world.

How leftist journalists make a living

How do leftist journalists make a living?

One important way is by serving as media outlets for similar thinking politicians. You know, the whole court eunuch/stenographer to the king thing?

Sometimes these sort of left-on-left love-ins are done with the court and/or king off the record so a to release the journalist from their alleged responsibility to report the facts.

The Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington is generally forthcoming about her enterprise and its journalism.

Except, that is, when she’s invited to an off-the-record meeting [along with “Most of MSNBC’s prime time lineup — Al Sharpton, Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell” and The Washington Posts  Jonathan Capehart and Greg Sargent…] in the White House with President Obama. “Since it was off the record, she’s unable to discuss,” responded Huffington Post spokesman Rhoades Alderson when asked whether his boss could pick up the phone.

How’s it all work? Simple: the leftist politicians have a point of view they want to promote and the leftists journalists want to promote the point of view. It’s called insider access and in this case, it would be better called boosterism. Depending on insider information is largely the same for those who write on sporting teams, the entertainment industry, activities in the judicial and law enforcement communities, etc., and yet the boosterism is not nearly so rampant.

The political flip side happens with the journalistic right as well, but since lefty journalists outnumber the right approximately 20 to 1, it has far less effect.

And when the right is in power and the left lacks the access they traditionally have, what do they do?

They throw darts, criticize, and distort the right. This behavior is a result of their natural inclinations and also, based on directions from their political handlers.

And that’s the way it is.

China and North Korea’s Missile Problem

China says it has a responsibility to try and dissuade its “blood ally,” North Korea, from launching a three-stage rocket in a few weeks but that they only hold so much sway over their belligerent neighbors.

First, it would be better said that China is North Korea’s “bloody ally.”

Second, the non-power of the UN is again on display. There are already at least two resolutions against North Korea with regard to pursuing ballistic missile technologies and testing such capabilities. It’s like the bumper sticker on gun laws: when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. And China could easily get North Korea to turn off any such test were they so inclined.

Finally, maybe this would be a good chance for a more useful UN resolution, one that would endorse the US using its anti-missile systems to shoot down any North Korean launch. Yes, Russia and China would be opposed, but the US, along with South Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, could form a formidable political block of shared interests on the subject, and as with North Korea, could just ignore the lack of authorization and act if they wanted.

Still, don’t hold your breath on a real world missile defense demonstration. Much bureaucratic wrangling and consensus building would be required (the State Department is good at making speeches and traveling; not so good at building consensus) and for the rest of the Obama Administration, were a shoot-down to occur, it would only refocus their de-funding decisions on missile defense as well as the pending cuts to defense spending (and the country’s associated security vulnerabilities) via sequestration.

Joe Stalin versus Barack Obama

What’s the difference between Joe Stalin and Barack Obama? Obama doesn’t have a moustache and Stalin didn’t smoke.

But the similarities between the two are shocking. Neither Stalin nor Obama are capable of understanding that the leader exists to make things better, not just to accumulate personal power, punish one’s enemies, and similarly, reward friends. Both Obama and Stalin are (were) so steeped in and blinded by their politics they can’t understand the destructive course they so carefully laid out for their respective countries.

Charles Krauthammer thinks this—as epitomized by the fiscal-cliff “negotiations”—is Obama’s way to destroy the Republicans.

… Obama’s objective in these negotiations is not economic but political: not to solve the debt crisis but to fracture the Republican majority in the House. Get Boehner to cave, pass the tax hike with Democratic votes provided by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and let the Republican civil war begin.

But as was said during the run-up to the election, “the campaign reflects the candidate,” meaning the current fiscal wrangling is one reflective of Obama’s character. It seems the reality is Obama long ago willingly drank the red Kool-Aid in order to acquire (in a derivation of the Francis Schaeffer hypothesis) personal power and affluence. Most sadly, our President appears to offer us the worst of all leadership combinations; he’s a fool with initiative, or resaid, possesses a second-class intellect and a temperament to match.

And for America? You reap what you sow… and what you vote for.

Why the IC goes PC

Why has the intelligence community gone politically correct? Because it’s a huge bureaucratic organization that’s fighting for relevance as determined by mission, manpower, and money.

Who provides the missions, manpower, and money?

Politicos, to include progressive politicos. The politicos of the left view the military, the schools, and anything “they” (via the taxpayer and/or borrowing) fund, to include the intelligence community as their own experiment in liberal social engineering:

For the first time in its history, the Central Intelligence Agency is actively seeking recruits from a new demographic – the lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender community.

There’s the answer to the Petraeus meltdown: he should have said he was bi-sexual in his mea culpa (or given the beating he suffered anyway, at least make Obama fire him for effectively doing what Bill Clinton was doing. That would have put Barry in a spot…).

But what about the effectiveness of the intelligence community’s mission (and let’s just ignore its efficiency)? Based on the record, it isn’t good. Technical surveillance and contractor created tools to lash things together (and then using them to kill bad guys) may be awe-inducing, but what about the longer term analysis? Who in the IC saw the “Arab Spring” coming? While I’m sure some did, I’d also bet their analysis never reached the “senior leader” level.

There, the issue is one of filtering. My hypothesis is that our nation’s intelligence products are filtered, dumbed-down (or turned into a crisis, if that’s the desired outcome), and/or politicized by our senior leaders and “public servants” until it’s no longer recognizable as the truth. And for what it’s worth, the intelligence community doesn’t really have all that sterling a record when it comes to (for example) the revolution in Iran, the collapse of the Soviet empire, 9/11, found WMD in Iraq, etc.

In the meantime, others—domestic U.S. law enforcement (including the FBI and Homeland Security)—want to read all your texts, e-mails, and anything you’ve perused on the internet.

Where is the outrage? There is none, because it seems by mutual agreement, senior leaders in the intelligence community and their corresponding politicos have decided it would be better to support one another, regardless of the detrimental effect on national security, let alone the truth.

Why? Because otherwise, people’s careers might get off track or the budget might be cut. Has the IC (some, much, almost all?) become the fabled self-licking ice cream cone?

Hey lefties, where’s your hate crime?

It isn’t enough that a person be tried for their crimes; instead they must also be charged regarding their hateful thoughts.

Example: media-and-leftist madness regarding “White Hispanic” George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case.

But now we have a Black man who has been charged with killing a Korean man by pushing him in front of an oncoming subway train which fatally crushed him.

And regarding the hate crime outrage we have… crickets.

I’m not in favor of hate crimes but the media’s hypocrisy patently absurd.

Another lefty writer made ill by Democrat’s hypocrisy

I’m shocked, shocked!

Now that the election is safely behind them, the left feels it is safe to bravely critique the President and his fellow travelers. Not on anything as substantive as the Benghazi debacle or Fast and Furious, but on other more tangential items like crony politics and the Democrat’s ever revolving government-industry door.

Before the election the lefty writers were all-in for Barry and anything associated with a parenthetical D. But now that Mitt Romney has been vanquished, some libs are starting to see that Obamaworld ain’t all it’s cracked up to be (or maybe they’re just exercising some sort of pent up frustration/concern that Dear Reader’s leadership may be poisoning the well for 2014 and 2016, when it’ll finally be Hillary’s turn).

From The Guardian:

It’s difficult to find someone who embodies the sleazy, anti-democratic, corporatist revolving door that greases Washington as shamelessly and purely as Liz Fowler.

Who is Liz Fowler?

When the legislation that became known as “Obamacare” was first drafted, the key legislator was the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, whose committee took the lead in drafting the legislation. As Baucus himself repeatedly boasted, the architect of that legislation was Elizabeth Folwer, his chief health policy counsel; indeed, as Marcy Wheeler discovered, it was Fowler who actually drafted it. As Politico put it at the time: “If you drew an organizational chart of major players in the Senate health care negotiations, Fowler would be the chief operating officer.”

What was most amazing about all of that was that, before joining Baucus’ office as the point person for the health care bill, Fowler was the Vice President for Public Policy and External Affairs (i.e. informal lobbying) at WellPoint, the nation’s largest health insurance provider (before going to WellPoint, as well as after, Folwer had worked as Baucus’ top health care aide). And when that health care bill was drafted, the person whom Fowler replaced as chief health counsel in Baucus’ office, Michelle Easton, was lobbying for WellPoint as a principal at Tarplin, Downs, and Young.

I live in Montana where the phrase is something like this: “That’s Max (D, MT) being Max.” And having participated in the sausage being made, I’d be surprised if WellPoint didn’t draft Obamacare on behalf of the Finance Committee and provide it to Fowler, gratis. Then Fowler sticks a cover sheet on it with Baucus’ name prominently on the cover and bam, you got your draft legislation.

The Administration’s well-practiced crony capitalism is just as unsustainable as the debt-bomb it’s building and refuses to help dismantle. Things that can’t continue forever won’t.

Post-election, media discovers Obama is a liar

From Dana Milkbag Milbank, who post-election, has discovered his President is a do as I say and not as I do type of guy:

“My administration,” President Obama wrote on his first day in office, “is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government.”

Those were strong and hopeful words. Four years later, it is becoming more and more clear that they were just words.

I suppose it depends how one defines openness:

By certain measures, “overall secrecy has actually increased rather than declined,” said Steven Aftergood, who runs the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. “Criminalization of unauthorized disclosures of information to the press has risen sharply, becoming a preferred tactic. Efforts to promote public accountability in controversial aspects of counterterrorism policy such as targeted killing have been blocked by threadbare, hardly credible national security secrecy claims.”

But Milkbag still manages to write a note for Broncobama and sign it as his mother:

The Obama administration has, to its credit, made progress in a few areas: releasing more of the White House visitor logs, disseminating more information about nuclear weapons, disclosing more about intelligence spending, and declassifying more historical records.

Yes, and Ted Bundy, to his credit, was considered handsome and charismatic by his victims, with fastidious personal grooming habits.

Barack Obama: making the Clinton Administration look forthright since 2009. And the imbedded yet unspoken liberal political thoughts Milbank brings forth: 1) The election is over and we can discuss some of Obama’s shortcomings now. And 2) What, you expected the man to keep his word?

Sports “journalists” remain the lowest form of reporting

Bob Costas is the latest example why sports journalists remain at the bottom of the media totem pole. The NRO synopsis:

During halftime of Football Night in America, which is not to be confused with Monday Night Football or Thursday Night Football, Costas referred to Belcher’s shocking murder-suicide as “nearly unfathomable.” He then proceeded to fathom it in terms of a clichéd gun-control fable. Costas quoted approvingly sportswriter Jason Whitlock’s argument that “our current gun culture simply ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy.”

Costas has long capitalized on his smarmy ability to suck up to athletes, his once boyish good looks (think John Edwards; HD reveals the truth), and his “romance with sport” (it appears unlikely he played any of them) to end up, in time, like Dan Rather, at the top of his journalism pile.

When he was a kid, Costas probably wrote poems about the manliness of Stan Musial or the likes (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and churned out articles for the school paper his mother found interesting. And the above block quote’s Jason Whitlock reference is telling. Whitlock is also one of America’s more inept sports “journalists.” Whitlock is usually—not always—like Charles Barkley without any of the game, humor, insight, or perspective.

If the victim of Belcher’s murder had herself possessed a gun, perhaps she’d be alive today. And without Belcher’s inherent personality, magnified by (or perhaps controlled by) “alcohol. concussions, and prescription drugs,” responsible gun ownership is not a problem for normal citizens. There’s much to unpack with regard to the Belcher tragedy, including family (the presence of a father), poverty, personal responsibility, and sport itself (including the NFL, college football, and coaching).

The problem with Costas, Whitlock, Peter King, and much of the “sports journalism” community is they drank the Kool-Aide of the mainstream media, embracing their failed liberal worldview and losing perspective. The bumper sticker is true: guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Maybe banning violent collisions and injuries in football (and other sports), banning alcohol, or banning the irresponsible use of prescription drugs is something Costas could pursue in the name of sports journalism. Sport is a subset of life, not the other way around.