Just the kind of story I would expect from a Bill Clinton appointee and Al Gore advisor who attempted to influence a succeeding FCC chair (Michael Powell) to block the pre-presidential-election-of-2004 public broadcasting of STOLEN HONOR, a documentary critical of John Kerry's Vietnam war record:
Until we were so rudely interrupted by President Bush's latest Supreme Court pick, we were having an illuminating squabble over Bill Bennett. And since Bennett's remarks on his radio show have already morphed into something of an urban legend in many quarters, I think they're worth revisiting.
A quick recap: Bennett got a call from a listener suggesting that Social Security was in financial straits because so many taxpayers had been aborted after Roe vs. Wade. The caller was making an ostensibly pro-life point. But Bennett, also a pro-lifer, objected. That's not the way you should look at abortion, he said. Such utilitarianism is a distraction and morally unreliable. He cited the book Freakonomics, by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt, which argues, among other things, that the increase in abortions since Roe vs. Wade has contributed considerably to the drop in the crime rate.
And then Bennett offered the infamous hypothetical, saying: "I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down."
Now, many of you probably know all of this so far. But some probably do not because you've heard about this second hand. And Democrats and many liberals have been trying to distort what Bennett said. Former DNC chair Terry McAuliffe: "The point he was trying to make, I guess, he said, you know, if you were to go out there and kill the black babies, the crime would go down." Ted Kennedy and a predictably long list of others have called him a racist. Radio host Ed Schultz said: Bennett is "out there advocating the murder of all black babies."
There are too many ways in which this anti-Bennett backlash is cheap and tawdry to discuss here. (Though I should note that a considerable minority of liberal writers who loathe Bennett refuse to participate in the witchhunt.)
My first objection is more of a delicious irony. Notice how so many righteously offended liberals keep referring to fetuses as people. In the New York Times, Bob Herbert proclaims that Bennett considers "exterminating blacks would be a most effective crime-fighting tool." Schultz and McAuliffe say Bennett wants to exterminate "babies."
Funny, I thought the bedrock faith of pro-abortion liberals is that fetuses aren't babies. Isn't it interesting how this lynchpin of liberal morality evaporates the moment an opportunity to call Bennett a racist presents itself? Talk about utilitarianism.
Many Bennett stalwarts have spent a lot of time defending him on the grounds that what he said is actually true. Since black crime rates are disproportionately high, they reason, eliminating the next generation — as horrific as that would be — would reduce the overall rate. In response, some liberals have put on their Karnak the Magnificent hats and tried to rebut this by trying to predict what would really happen under the Bennett hypothesis. Tax rolls would go down, schools would close, etc., etc.
All of this is a grand exercise in futility and absurdity. Of course, no one knows what the real repercussions would be if you aborted every black baby in America. One repercussion would probably be civil war or revolution, as nearly the entire black population of the United States, along with large majorities of white pro-lifers and pro-choicers, righteously and legitimately took up arms to prevent the government from committing genocide. And, I should add, one of the guys shouting "Lock and load!" would undoubtedly be Bennett himself.
Which raises the point missed by so many Bennett detractors, often deliberately. His argument wasn't about race at all. His point was to discourage even pro-lifers from demeaning the cause by making abortion into an acceptable governmental tool for social policy.
Bennett was sincere when he said that aborting all black babies simply to lower the crime rate would be "ridiculous, and morally reprehensible." He could have just as easily said to the caller: "Hey, look, we could save a lot of money on skyrocketing education costs if only we aborted the mentally impaired and learning disabled. But you know what? Ends cannot justify the means of murdering the unborn." It would be silly to waste a lot of time trying to rebut him by saying, "Well, actually you wouldn't save that much money."
The former philosophy professor picked a hypothetical that he thought would make the horror of such utilitarianism obvious to everybody. Murder a whole generation just to lower the crime rate? Disgusting!
Bennett's real mistake was in thinking people would be mature enough to get it.
In the course of a free-wheeling conversation so common on talk-format programs, Bill Bennett made a minor point that was statistically and logically unassailable, but that touched a third rail — namely, the nexus between race and crime — within the highly charged context of abortion policy.
He emphatically qualified his remarks from the standpoint of morality. Then he ended with the entirely valid conclusion that sweeping generalizations are unhelpful in making major policy decisions.
That he was right in this seems to matter little. Bennett is being fried by the PC police and the ethnic-grievance industry, which have disingenuously ripped his minor point out of its context in a shameful effort to paint him as a racist. He’s about as bigoted as Santa Claus.
Here’s what happened. In the course of his Morning in America radio show on Wednesday, Bennett engaged a caller who sought to view the complexities of Social Security solvency through the narrow lens of abortion, an explosive but only tangentially relevant issue. Specifically, the caller contended that if there had not been so many abortions since 1973, there would be millions more living people paying into the Social Security System, and perhaps the system would be solvent.
Bennett, typically well-informed, responded with skepticism over this method of argument by making reference to a book he had read, which had made an analogous claim: namely, that it was the high abortion rate which was responsible for the overall decline in crime. The former Education secretary took pains to say that he disagreed with this theory, and then developed an argument for why we should resist “extensive extrapolations” from minor premises (like the number of abortions) in forming major conclusions about complex policy questions.
It was in this context that Bennett remarked: “I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” Was he suggesting such a thing? Was he saying that such a thing should even be considered in the real world? Of course not. His whole point was that such considerations are patently absurd, and thus he was quick to add: “That would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do.”
Bennett’s position, clearly and irrefutably, is that you cannot have tunnel vision, especially on something as emotionally charged as abortion, in addressing multifaceted problems. It is almost always the case that problems, even serious ones, could be minimized or eliminated if you were willing to entertain severe solutions. Such solutions, though, are morally and ethically unacceptable, whatever the validity of their logic. The lesson to be drawn is not that we can hypothetically conceive of the severe solutions but that we resolutely reject them because of our moral core.
This is a bedrock feature of American law and life. We could, for example, dramatically reduce crimes such as robbery and rape by making those capital offenses. We don’t do it because such a draconian solution would be offensive to who we are as a people. But it is no doubt true that if we were willing to check our morality at the door, if the only thing we allowed ourselves to focus on were the reduction of robbery and rape, the death penalty would do the trick.
We are currently at war with Islamo-fascists, and our greatest fear is another domestic attack that could kill tens of thousands of Americans. The attacks we have suffered to this point have been inflicted, almost exclusively, by Muslim aliens from particular Arabic and African countries. Would it greatly reduce the chance of another domestic attack if we deported every non-American Muslim from those countries? Of course it would — how could it not? But it is not something that we should or would consider doing. It would be a cure so much worse than the disease that it would sully us as a people, while hurting thousands of innocent people in the process.
The salient thing here is the moral judgment. But, to be demonstrated compellingly, the moral judgment requires a dilemma that pits values against values. Remarkably, Bennett is being criticized for being able to frame such a dilemma — which was wholly hypothetical — but given no credit for the moral judgment — which was authentically his.
Statistics have long been kept on crime, breaking it down in various ways, including by race and ethnicity. Some identifiable groups, considered as a group, commit crime at a rate that is higher than the national rate.
Blacks are such a group. That is simply a fact. Indeed, our public discourse on it, even among prominent African Americans, has not been to dispute the numbers but to argue over the causes of the high rate: Is it poverty? Breakdown of the family? Undue police attention? Other factors — or some combination of all the factors? We argue about all these things, but the argument always proceeds from the incontestable fact that the rate is high.
The rate being high, it is an unavoidable mathematical reality that if the number of blacks, or of any group whose rate outstripped the national rate, were reduced or eliminated from the national computation, the national rate would go down.
But Bennett’s obvious point was that crime reduction is not the be-all and end-all of good policy. You would not approve of something you see as despicable — such as reducing an ethnic population by abortion — simply because it would have the incidental effect of reducing crime.
Abortion, moreover, is a grave moral issue in its own right. It merits consideration on its own merits, wholly apart from its incidental effects on innumerable matters — crime rate and social security solvency being just two.
“[T]hese far-out, these far-reaching … extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky,” Bennett concluded. It was a point worth making, and it could not have been made effectively without a “far-out” example that highlighted the folly. Plus he was right, which ought to count for something even in what passes for today’s media critiques.
— Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
WHAT IS IT about liberals and conservatives that they can both say the same thing but liberals are praised as paragons of enlightenment while conservatives are reviled as green-eyed monsters?
William Bennett was in hot water last week for disputing a theory that a liberal economist has been touting for four years - that the big drop in crime during the 1990s was a salutary result of legalized abortion.
Steven D. Levitt, a maverick economist at the University of Chicago, first put forward the theory in a 2001 paper entitled "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime." He has since made it the centerpiece of "Freakonomics," his bestseller co-authored with New York Times reporter Stephen J. Dubner.
Last July, The Record published a lengthy excerpt from the book ("Looking at Society's Puzzles in a Whole New Way," Opinion, July 24) Levitt's thesis is that before abortion was legalized in 1973, only affluent women were able to get abortions. This changed when New York and California legalized abortion in the Seventies and then the Supreme Court legalized it for the whole country in 1973. Now poor women could get abortions as well.
As Levitt argued in The Record, this allowed "poor, unmarried teenage mothers" to abort their children. "They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals."
To liberals, Levitt's argument is a home run. It does two laudable things: 1) it celebrates abortion, and 2) it undercuts the argument that Rudy Giuliani's "broken windows" policing and other conservative approaches to crime had any impact.
The theory also has blatant racial overtones. Although Levitt never comes out and says it, he is obviously talking about blacks. Blacks are hugely over-represented among "poor, unmarried teenage mothers" and among the "big-city teenager with a cheap gun in his hand and nothing in his heart but ruthlessness."
Anyone who spends five minutes studying crime statistics knows that black communities have violent crime rates five or six times that of white communities. (For statistics, see: www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/race.htm) So has anybody called Levitt a racist or said he is proposing abortion as a way of solving crime? Not a word. Instead, he is celebrated as a brilliant and intriguing iconoclast.
Now comes along William Bennett, who is against abortion and believes that law enforcement is the way to curtail crime. Responding to the abortion thesis on his radio program, he takes the argument to its logical conclusion. "If you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in the country," he says. "That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down."
In other words, let's be honest about what you're talking about here. So what happens? Suddenly after four years, everybody sits up and takes notice. "What? Did he say he wants to abort black babies in order to lower the crime rate? Why that's racist, sexist, and every other bad thing."
So Bennett becomes the scapegoat for arguing against Levitt's message.
I frankly think Levitt is wrong for a number of reasons. First, Levitt assumes that every abortion represents what previously would have been a live birth. But young women have changed their behavior in response to legalizing abortion. Where they used to worry about getting pregnant, now they tend to use abortion as a form of birth control.
Second, Levitt assumes that rates of illegitimacy and single motherhood haven't changed. They have. Illegitimacy rates were only 30 percent in 1970, as opposed to 75 percent today. Even if abortion had reduced fertility among poor single mothers, the pool itself has been growing larger.
F inally, there was no decline in the population of young black males. The population of 15-to-19-year-olds grew 70 percent from 1970 to 1990. That can hardly explain a 60 percent reduction in violent crime.
In fact, the number of abortions may represent nothing more than young women becoming more careless about getting pregnant.
Anyone who lived in New York City in the 1990s knows that the reduction in crime came not from any reduction in the number of young people but from the police cracking down on drug dealing and reclaiming public spaces for the law-abiding citizens.
This might be hard to capture in statistics, but it certainly beats playing with numbers on abortion.
William Tucker is an associate at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
ARE you getting as fed up as I am with this apparently endless game of gotcha quotes? The latest round is the flap about what was recently said by William Bennett, the Republican former secretary of education, drug czar and what-all. He said that if we want to cut the crime rate, we could encourage whole abortions of black babies. That is indeed appalling, or would be if Bennett had said it, or even implied it. He didn't. Bennett was countering a caller to his radio program. The caller had recommended, as an additional anti-abortion talking point, the calculation that Social Security would be in better financial shape if all those contributors to it hadn't been aborted.
Bennett, himself an abortion opponent, was saying, whoa! Abortion's inherent immorality is all the argument you need. Resorting to dubious statistics is unnecessary and could backfire. For instance, he said, abortion supporters could argue that we could reduce crime by aborting black babies.
No matter. The left rushed into high dudgeon and withering fire poured in from all the expected political compass points, with some commentators even charging that Bennett had declared for racial genocide.
Thus was the political atmosphere, already sour, fed still another poison pill. It is getting a steady diet of those nowadays.
Something of the same thing happened just weeks earlier when Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois decried the appalling prisoner abuses at Guantanamo detailed in an FBI report. To read of them, Durbin said, you'd think "this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulag or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others ..."
That time the carefully choreographed meltdown was on the right. A Democrat was calling the young men and women of our military Nazis.
He was doing no such thing. Durbin had resorted to the common rhetorical device of hyperbole in order to draw, he hoped, sobered attention to a perfectly legitimate concern.
Bennett and Durbin alike could fairly be charged with aggravated infelicity, but that's about the worst of it.
This has become a tit-for-tat joust in which neither side dares quit for fear of leaving the other one-up. Liberal and conservative bloggers patrol the ether in search of untoward utterances that can be hung on each other.
And our 24-7 media, ever hungry for content or something than can be made to seem like it, jump on each retailed indignation as if it were a hot date.
These supposed outrages burn white for a few days, then fade and a few months later you can't remember just what they were about. But nonetheless, each time the political space that we all share has been left just a bit more sullied, and the grime is building up.
William Bennett, former Secretary of Education, ex-drug czar, reformed smoker, recreational gambler, and America’s self-appointed guidance counselor, is in deep do-do again.
It all started on his talk show “Morning in America.” Some high school philosopher called in and reckoned as how abortion was a bad thing because it killed babies before they could grow up and pay taxes, thus funding Social Security for the caller’s benefit.
Bennett, although an avowed anti-abortionist, disagreed with the caller. He maintained that to approach moral issues from an economic standpoint places one on shaky ground indeed.
Then Bennett assumed his self-appointed role as professor of the airways, and flogged the hapless caller with a particularly onerous example: “If you wanted to reduce crime, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.”
Tricky indeed. The erstwhile Sweet William is now being tarred with a sticky, malodorous substance, the stench of which is likely to linger. Nevertheless, his point seemed obvious at the time, and he drove it home with gusto: abortion cannot be justified on materialistic grounds. Killing babies is wrong because — well, because it is wrong.
These type of philosophical forays often become messy, and are seldom conclusive, but they provide the guideposts by which we live. Is it permissible to murder one man so as to rescue mankind from oblivion? Is it permissible to kill one to save a thousand? A hundred? Two? Is it morally wrong for a mother to steal to feed her children? How about the elderly lady who shoplifts to feed her cat? When the government steals from one and gives to another, who should be held accountable, the politicians or the voters?
Wrestling with these hypothetical “horns of a dilemma” issues at an early age can be instrumental in developing the moral ballast which, in later years, governs our response to practical issues, and ultimately determines who we are.
Teachers of old routinely engaged in these activities without fear of censure, and even in today’s new and improved world, I search in vain for a serious fault in Bennett’s response to the caller’s faulty hypotheses.
Others, of course, view the aforementioned incident in an entirely different light. This just in from ABC: “After pondering on his radio program how aborting every black infant in America would affect crime rates Bill Bennett is vehemently denying he is a racist ”
From the Associated Press: “Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and other Democrats demanded Bennett apologize for linking the crime rate and the abortion of black babies.”
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., when asked to comment on the issue responded thusly: “Really, I’m thinking of my black grandchild and I’m going to hold (off).” House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi commented that “Secretary Bennett does not reflect mainstream American values.” DNC Chairman Howard Dean screamed, “Bill Bennett’s hateful, inflammatory remarks regarding African Americans are simply inexcusable.”
Democrats, in general, have expressed extreme outrage, and many have requested that the Federal Communications Commission kick Bennett’s show off the air, or at least levy a large fine against him for introducing race into the abortion issue.
Finally, we hear from a Texas philosopher. Greg Moses, editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of “Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence,” offers the following:
“Taking a page from his Book of Cracker Virtues, Texas-trained philosopher William Bennett this week performed a little thought experiment where genocide by means of abortion might be used to bring down the crime rate. Of course it is appalling how Bennett’s mind plays around with the souls of black folk, one moment imagining a whole peoples aborted, but such is the nature of the souls of white folk, flying right through the concept of genocide without noticing the horrific criminality in that.”
Welcome to the Politically Correct Society. It is an amorphous society, where the boundaries of acceptable speech are arbitrarily set by the chattering class and unevenly enforced by the sword of character assassination. This sword, a thing with two edges, is currently in the hands of political ideologues and private opportunists, and it is honed to a razor’s edge. Next victim, please.
"Hypocrisy is a value." - Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic Party.
"African-Americans are synonymous with crime." - Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich.
"Students can put dope in their veins." - Jesse Jackson.
"An entire race of people shouldn't have been born." - Erich Streckfuss, president of the University of Cincinnati College Democrats, who planned to protest a visit by former Education Secretary William Bennett for "racist" remarks on his radio show.
All of those quotes are true - and truly distorted. They were wrenched violently out of context like a dislocated arm.
Dean actually said hypocrisy is a value of the Republican Party. Conyers accused Bennett of saying black people are synonymous with crime. Jackson said students can put dope in their veins or hope in their brains. And Streckfuss was misinterpreting Bennett's comment.
Every reporter knows taking a quote out of context to make someone look like a fool is easier than pulling wings off flies.
But some just can't resist.
By now, it's well known that Bennett has been indicted by the Politically Correct Police for being a "degenerate," "racist," "ignorant" "idiot," according to actual columns and editorials.
His crime: While pointing out that it would be morally reprehensible to do so, he said it could be argued that aborting black babies would reduce crime.
For that, he has been dragged into the media corn-picker, where his reputation will eventually emerge mangled beyond recognition. Bennett canceled his visit to UC campus Republicans, scheduled for tonight.
That's too bad. Cincinnati could learn a lot if he would explain himself.
For example: It's silly to say Bennett was arguing for abortions. He's a devout pro-lifer.
He did not originate the "abortions cut crime" argument. That came from a book called "Freakonomics," which postulated that states with the highest abortion rates had lower crime rates.
Bennett cited that theory to explain the fallacy of using abortion as a social tool. His argument is identical to one used by Wikipedia as a textbook example of the rhetorical tactic reductio ad absurdum:
"A - If our country aborted fewer babies, we'd have more taxpayers to fund our social programs. "
"B - And if we wanted less crime we could just abort all minority babies, since adult minorities commit most of the crime. But that would be absurd. Abortion should not be used as a tool of social engineering."
A logically challenged liberal Web site funded by George Soros fed Bennett's quote to the media, and the dogs were turned loose.
The apoplectic reactions by Dean, Jackson, Conyers and the National Liberal Pundits Echo Chamber makes me wonder: What are they afraid of?
Are they worried that we might discover that African-Americans account for a disproportionate share of crime compared with their population?
In Cincinnati, 80 percent of gun assaults are young black men shooting young black men - a small group that causes a very large amount of crime. Black people are also disproportionately likely to be victims of crime. Can we talk about that? I guess not.
Only a moral imbecile would advocate using abortion to cut crime. Anyone who listens fairly can see Bennett did not do that.
But now anyone who defends him takes the risk of being called a "racist" by the P.C. Police. That's why it needs to be done.
"Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection." - Colin Powell, not out of context.
There are times when I sorely miss boilerplate -- those entirely predictable statements made by politicians that often begin with the word ''frankly,'' then proceed to the phrase ''I don't think the American people want,'' and conclude with a thundering banality that a drowsy dog could see coming. That was especially the case last week when I started reading what Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, had to say about Tom DeLay, her Republican opposite. I fully expected boilerplate, something about innocent until proved guilty. But Pelosi crossed me up. DeLay, as it turned out, was guilty until proved innocent.
''The criminal indictment of Majority Leader Tom DeLay is the latest example that Republicans in Congress are plagued by a culture of corruption at the expense of the American people,'' Pelosi said -- apparently forgetting to add the boilerplate about the American system of justice. If she had those thoughts, they're not on her Web site and not mentioned anywhere. Instead, the reference to a Republican ''culture of corruption'' shows that when it comes to a punctilious regard for the legal process, in this instance the Democrats ain't got no culture at all.
This is an example of why the Democratic Party is in such trouble. Democrats are aping what Newt Gingrich once did to them when he was speaker of the House, a leader of the GOP and a self-proclaimed dazzling revolutionary. His incessant cry of ''Corruption! Corruption!'' helped end Democratic rule of Congress but it was accompanied -- Democrats seem to forget -- by an idea or two and emerging Republican majorities in the country as a whole. Stinging press releases alone do not a revolution make.
For prominent Democrats, it seemed that it was not enough to forget their manners about DeLay. They then abandoned their party's tradition -- I would say ''obligation'' -- to defend unpopular speech by piling on William Bennett, the former education secretary, best-selling author and now, inevitably, talk-show host.
Responding to a caller who argued that if abortion was outlawed the Social Security trust fund would benefit -- more people, more contributions, was the apparent (idiotic) reasoning -- Bennett said, sure, he understood what the fellow was saying. It was similar to the theory that the low crime rate of recent years was the consequence of high abortion rates: the less African-American males born, the fewer crimes committed. (Young black males commit a disproportionate share of crime.) This theory has been around for some time. Bennett was not referring to anything new.
But he did add something very important: If implemented, the idea would be ``an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do.''
He should have saved his breath. Prominent Democrats -- Harry Reid in the Senate, John Conyers and Rahm Emanuel in the House and, of course, Pelosi -- jumped all over him. Conyers wanted Bennett suspended from his radio show. Emanuel said Bennett's comments ''reflect a spirit of hate and division.'' Pelosi said Bennett was out of the mainstream, and Reid simply asked for an apology.
Actually, it is Reid and the others who should apologize to Bennett. They were condemning and attempting to silence a public intellectual for a reference to a theory. It was not a proposal and not a recommendation -- nothing more than a possible explanation. But the Democrats preferred to pander to an audience that either had heard Bennett's remarks out of context, or merely thought that anytime that conservatives talk about race, they are being racist.
The Democrats' obligation as politicians, as public officials, to see that we all hear the widest and richest diversity of views was suspended in favor of partisan cheap shots. (The spineless White House also refused to defend Bennett.)
Because I came of age in the McCarthy era, I have always thought of the Democratic Party as more protective of free speech and unpopular thought than the Republican Party. The GOP was the party of Joe McCarthy, William Jenner and other witch-hunters. Now, though, it is the Democrats who use the pieties of race, ethnicity and gender to stifle debate and smother thought, pretty much what anti-intellectual intellectuals did to Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, when he had the effrontery to ask some unorthodox questions about gender and mathematical aptitude. He was quickly instructed on how to think.
A little boilerplate would do the Democrats good. It's never bad to remind the American people that an indictment is not equivalent to conviction, and speech is not free if it's going to cost you your job. These spitball press releases, these demeaning zingers, only tend to highlight the GOP argument that the Democrats are out of ideas.
The current flap over former Secretary of Education William Bennett’s remarks last week reveals just what a bizarre set of taboos Americans have imposed on themselves when it comes to race—and what a political booby trap leftists have managed to rig around the subject, ready to explode in a burst of career-destroying shrapnel at the slightest misstep. Yes, it was insensitive of Mr. Bennett to notice the fact that black Americans commit violent crimes in highly disproportionate numbers. It’s worth making a special effort not to incriminate the vast majority of law-abiding black citizens—many of whom grow up poor in broken homes, subjected to stronger temptations than those of us who grew up differently. Given the history of eugenics in the last century, one can understand a certain touchiness on the subject. But the ferocity with which liberals pounced on Bennett—so soon after accusing President Bush of racism for FEMA’s failure to (do black Mayor Ray Nagin’s job for him and) rescue black New Orleanians—betray a profound political cynicism, and a willingness to seize crassly (and selectively) upon human tragedy to make cheap rhetorical points.
To recap the Bennett flap: Mr. Bennett is being condemned for a slip of the tongue which contravened the rules of polite discourse which govern how crime is depicted in mainstream media. Bennett was speaking on the radio about an assertion by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, who claimed in their ludicrously overpraised book Freakonomics that abortion decreases crime—essentially by imposing capital punishment in advance on babies who are more likely to grow up as felons. Let’s leave aside for a moment how morally repulsive this idea is—reeking of precisely the same eugenic logic preached by Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, who called for “more children from the fit, fewer from the unfit.” Worse than evil, this argument isn’t even valid. It has been comprehensively dismantled by the clear-thinking and candid Steve Sailer, who showed that the crime decline attributed by Dubner and Levitt to legal abortion in fact had far more to do with a decline in the popularity of crack, and the election of mayors such as Rudolph Giuliani in New York. Since blacks are disproportionately the victims as well of violent crime, any improvement in public order will save far more black lives and livelihoods than white. Of course, because most such tough-on-crime mayors are Republican, they won’t get the credit for this.
Now you’d think that a couple of economists who spoke with thinly veiled enthusiasm about culling entire social classes before they are born in order to kill off future criminals would find themselves exiled from decent society. I know I wouldn’t sit down and eat with this kind of creep. But far from ostracism, Messrs. Dubner and Levitt are heroes. Their book is a massive best-seller, recently excerpted by the New York Times. How did they manage this coup? Because they didn’t mention race. They presented their argument about thinning out the crop of future felons, and conveniently left out the fact that most of these children aborted would be poor, and either Hispanic or black. This allowed the reader to fill in the blank—and fantasize about suppressing the crime rate a little more, and maybe reclaiming some blighted neighborhoods as well, by arranging for “fewer children from the unfit.” I once heard people talking precisely this way at a cocktail party, and stepped in to ask them, “By that logic, why don’t you just carpet bomb the ghetto? That would cut crime too.” Without cracking a smile, one of them said, “That wouldn’t be as politically palatable.” I steered clear of this knot of sociopaths for the rest of the evening.
Now Mr. Bennett, in his commentary, was making the same point I was, which Steven Sailer reiterates—that the theory presented by Dubner and Levitt is “impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible.” But in the course of his comments, Bennett made the mistake of noticing the African elephant in the bathtub—the fact that since the residents of America’s prisons are disproportionately black, people who daydream about emptying those prisons by killing off their residents before they are even born are fantasizing about killing black people. This fact was noticed decades ago by no less a race-baiter than the Rev. Jesse Jackson, when he called legal abortion “black genocide.” That hasn’t stopped Jackson from supporting legal abortion, however—or cozying up to President Bill Clinton, who as commander in chief ordered the withdrawal of U.S. peace-keeping forces from Rwanda, leaving millions of defenseless Tutsis to be slaughtered with machetes, while our and other nations’ blue helmets sped off to safety in other countries. Now which U.S. president was it, again, who doesn’t care about saving the lives of black people? (For a scathing look at Clinton’s blatant disregard for millions of African lives, see the powerful new documentary Broken Promises: The UN at 60, narrated by Ron Silver—coming soon to theaters.)
The irony gets richer; Reverend Jackson’s son, the Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., has insisted that “William Bennett should be censured and fined by the Federal Communications Commission for his repugnant and barbarous remarks.” Do you think the younger Jackson has forgotten his own father’s remarks—or that he’s unaware that black Americans are the primary targets of those who would promote abortion in order to thin out the ranks of the poor? Or is he simply and cynically ignoring the facts?
Instead, I would suggest, the younger Jackson is playing masterfully by the rules of racial rhetoric as they are currently laid out in American discourse. As this affair makes clear, among these commandments, three are the greatest:
1) Thou shalt ignore any statistics that cast racial minorities, even provisionally, in an unflattering light.
2) Thou shalt condemn anyone who mentions these statistics as a racist, even if you know that he is not a racist. The truth is not important. The important thing is the taboo.
3) Thou mayst entertain and promote racist fantasies of eliminating poor babies, Hispanic babies, and black babies in the womb, so long as you don’t mention their race. It’s okay to kill them, but not to mention their race.
Now that we’ve gotten all that clear, we can watch as Mr. Bennett is hounded into apology after apology, and perhaps driven out of public life, while the upper-class leftists who live in gated communities or high-rises with doormen indulge their bloodthirsty daydreams, secure in the knowledge that they’re not racists. Not at all.
Former Drug Czar and Secretary of Education Bill Bennett's comments over skin color, crime and abortion have lots of folks howling, from Nancy Pelosi to Howard Dean to the NAACP to Ted Kennedy to the White House (go figure). What prompted this bipartisan outrage?
Here's the incendiary remark that he made on his popular radio program:
"…if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose -- you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."
Bennett has pointed out, correctly, that his remarks have been taken out of context. Even liberal commentators like Matt Yglesias and Brad DeLong feel the context of the remarks is mitigating and Bennett has no reason to apologize for them.
But let's forget about the context for a minute. Context can be so… so… oh, well, it can take all the fun out of it. So let's just focus on what Bennett said, totally out of context.
DeLong and Yglesias and are sufficiently reality-based enough to know that blacks commit a disproportionate share of violent crimes in the United States. This is not news. It's not even a controversial proposition. Given that fact, it's not a monumentally difficult conceptual leap to surmise that if you aborted every black child in the country from here on out (a hideousness that no one is advocating), the crime rate would drop.
Without getting into the tricky context of Bennett's remarks -- that doing so would be morally reprehensible, etc. -- what more is there to say about it? That it isn't true? No one, as of this writing, has argued that.
Bill Clinton claimed while he was president that he wanted to have a "national conversation on race." Perhaps he was being sincere. But it's plain from recent events that hardly anyone else in this country really, truly wants to have a "conversation" on this topic. If the mindless, knee-jerk reaction to Bennett's remarks -- including from places like the White House -- is any indicator, no one has any interest in an honest discussion of race.
Perhaps it's nothing new, but we live in a time where uncomfortable truths -- even challenging questions -- are to be shouted down and, if possible, driven from the public square. Harvard University's Larry Summers discovered this recently. Now Bill Bennett is on the receiving end of this same idiotarian nonsense. America is the worse for it. Thank goodness some liberals were honest enough to defend him. Let's hope others see fit to do the same.