LOL!
Here's Bennett's statement:
On the Wednesday edition of his radio show, "Bill Bennett's Morning in America," syndicated by Salem Radio Network, a caller raised the theory that Social Security is in danger of becoming insolvent because legalized abortion has reduced the number of tax-paying citizens. Bennett said economic arguments should never be employed in discussions of moral issues.
If it were your sole purpose to reduce crime, Bennett said, "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," he added.
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Politics/stor ... KQHI4fAfO4I know that you're so blinded by your own bias that you're a case study, but it's hard for me to believe that even YOU had a straight face when you typed those words. He was CLEARLY stating his belief that "crime right would go down" if you aborted all black babies. Of course he wasn't supporting aborting all black babies, but he was clearly stating his belief about aborting black babies reducing crime.
And now you have to retreat to your historic fallback position - outright lying - when cornered by your own unread and intellectually shoddy polemics. That, of course, is why you used a secondary source and not the entirety of Bennett's comments, the means by which you hid the context of the statement.
Here's Bennett's own description - for leftists with reading comprehension and/or cognitive processing problems requiring more extensive remedial elucidation - of what actually happened.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commen ... 05_WB.htmlLet's quote Bennett from this speech, just to get past the self-inflicted learning disabilities that generate the liberal mind in the first place:
Recently on my radio show, Morning In America, I was having a discussion with a caller about good and bad arguments for and against abortion. He said that if we aborted fewer babies, we would increase our Social Security trust fund. I said that’s not how you want to argue against abortion. In the course of this discussion, I hypothesized another argument you don’t want to make, a deliberately abhorrent argument for abortion—that the abortion of black children would lead to a reduction in crime. I did so to show why amoral or immoral arguments for or against abortion are not good arguments. Rather, I suggested, stick to the morality of the issue, not cold calculations reducible to statistical analysis that can be argued both ways. I was putting forward a bad argument to immediately shoot it down. Widely circulated versions of my remarks – for example, on the Today Show, in Time Magazine, on MSNBC, and in a flurry of press releases from Capitol Hill – inaccurately reported what I said during that conversation, and what I meant. They reported or emphasized only the abhorrent argument, not my shooting it down.
And just to make it clearer:
So today, although I cannot apologize for what I said and meant, which when understood in context ought not be objectionable, I regret that people have misrepresented my views so that they have been the cause of hurt, controversy, and confusion. What was presented in some of the media as my opinion would shock me as well; so I cannot blame many people for being mad as hell at what they heard. But such characterizations of my statements and views are not a fair, accurate, or true picture of either what I believe or what I said. In my conversation, I was raising an abhorrent hypothetical—and said so—an idea contrary to everything I believe, and contrary to the record of my life, my work and my writings, including 17 books. Could I have said it better? Maybe. But my position, one of moral condemnation, could not have been clearer. “Morally reprehensible” are the words I used immediately, in the same breath and thought as this ugly hypothetical. What do my critics not understand about the meaning of the words “morally reprehensible”? Do they think it means approval?
You see, Beastie, Bennett has a Ph.D from Harvard in philosophy and the history of ideas. He, unlike 97% of those on the Left (and who are highly overrepresented on this board) is actually a
serious thinker, and he is capable of using nuanced, hypothetical arguments in pedagogic ways to make a larger theoretical point. He was making a
reductio ad abusrdum argument to make a larger point, something utterly lost on most public school educated Americans and upon most leftists, educated in the same manner but who didn't survive the process as well as some others. This is just another case (the very idea that Bennett himself is somehow a racist is so preposterous as to beg the personal motives of anyone implying such at the outset) of pious, power-fixated leftists offending for a word while carefully avoiding context and intellectual substance while giving a pass to their own when they show their true colors.
There's a long and morally sordid history of this kind of behavior among the Left that is another of those aspects of its culture and ideology that has come to define it, over time, and you've shown yourself, yet again, to be a charter member of that dubious club. This is exactly the kind of intellectually sloppy, disingenuous smear that has come to define and circumscribe pretty much all that the Left has to bring to the marketplace of ideas.
Melissa's comment was actually far more interesting and ideologically loaded than Giles, and there is no question about her seriousness. Giles was being serious too, as you well know, but attempted to hide it behind a mask of laughter. But that's why she said "you know, maybe" with such emphasis. Just as with numerous examples one could show of racist and racially chauvinistic comments and attitudes expressed over many years by black leftists in news and entertainment media (Samuel L. Jackson being only one recent example one could point to) and winked and nodded at by white liberals, there's a "bad" racism and a "good" racism (just like there is "bad" hate speech and "good" hate speech, with leftists able and willing to engage in the later) and the Anointed, of course, can purvey the good kind all they like, as they are, after all, the Anointed.
I'm much more interested in the connection between the eugenics movement and progressivism.
Snore.
That response to this question is the better part of valor, isn't it?
