Bill Bennett: eliminate black babies for less crime in America

And they -- the vicious right-wing crazies who charitably call themselves "Conservative" --they wonder why observors liken them to Nazis. Aside from the fact that Bush et al are intalling the finishing touches on a National Socialist system, i.e., monolithic merger between giant corporations and the state, there are other similarities.

First, here's the Columbia Encyclopedia's description of National Socialism:

... combined socialist economic ideas with rabid nationalism and opposition to democracy...

...demagogic appeals to latent hatred and violence... anti-Semitism, anti-Communist diatribes ... inner councils were swelled by such frustrated intellectuals as P. J. Goebbels, and by the element of riffraff typified by Julius Streicher, while its public adherents were heavily drawn from the depressed lower middle class... minimized the socialist features of the program. National Socialism made its appeal not to an economic class but rather to the insecure and power-hungry elements of society.

--- sound a little like Karl Rove's tactics and George Bush's "base?"

So here's what happened:

Bill Bennett, the man who completely bungled his appointment as Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan and then failed miserably as Drug Tsar before deciding that he -- a degenerate gambler -- was therefore qualified to write a book telling people how to live -- a book beloved by simpletons and demagogues of the Right: "The Book of Virtues." Bennett explained on his radio show yesterday that America could reduce its crime rate by killing off al the black babies.

Media Matters has the audio.

It began when a caller to Bennett's radio show suggested that Social Security had been undercut by the loss of all those wage-earners aborted inthe past 30 years, but Bennett managed to turn the comment around and make it into a bit of racist poison.

Here's the transcript:


CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security, and I was curious, and I've read articles in recent months here, that the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn't -- never touches this at all.

BENNETT: Assuming they're all productive citizens?

CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it would be an enormous amount of revenue.

BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don't know what the costs would be, too. I think as -- abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No.

CALLER: I don't know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.

BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics* that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well --

CALLER: Well, I don't think that statistic is accurate.

BENNETT: Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don't know. But 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. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky."


So my black friends have been right all along -- not that I doubted them, I just didn't think AIDS specifically had been created to wipe out the black and gay populations. I didn't think the virologists were clever enough.

But they got it right when they said that it's just below the surface -- the belief that eliminating all the people of color would be a good thing, good for America -- leaving only enough alive to perform as slaves for janitorial duties, cleaning out cesspools, and playing in the NFL. Certainly right below the surface with this thug who preaches virtue.

So how does that insincere disclaimer: "That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do" differ from Richard Nixon's disingenuous comment when discussing how paying off the Watergate criminals for their silence would be possible, "BUT THAT WOULD BE WRONG."

Well, to answer my own question, Nixon was talking about covering up a burglary and a bunch of constitutional violations, while Bennett was talking casually about committing genocide.


Is it legal to shoot someone who spreads this sort of poison? Probably not.

Besides, being against the death penalty, I would prefer to sentence him to life in a room with Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart, and they could all preach to each other.




*Freakonomics (William Morrow, May 2005) was written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Levitt and Dubner argued that aborted fetuses would have been more likely to grow up poor and in single-parent or teenage-parent households and therefore more likely to commit crimes; they did not put forth Bennett's race-based argument. Perhaps they were aware of how many degenerate gamblers turn to mugging and robbery, how many serial killers are white, how many crooked politicians, etc. They seem to have considered this an across-the-board phenomenon.

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