Before I address Bill Bennett’s comments that led many on the Left to manufacture outrage to try and score political points, let’s look at the book he was referring to on his show when the comments were made.
The book is called Freakonomics and is billed by the author as a book that “will literally redefine the way we view the modern world”. The book explores the causal relationships between occurences in society that really have no proximate causal links. One specific example of such relationship, the one Bennett was referring to, is that legalizing abortion helped reduce the crime rate. Here’s an excerpt:
Perhaps the most dramatic effect of legalized abortion, and one that would take years to reveal itself, was its impact on crime.
In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v. Wade was hitting its late teen years-the years during which young men enter their criminal prime-the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime.
In fact, it was the author of the book that suggested abortion as the positive influence in reducing crime rates. Bennett was using that crazy assertion from the book as a warning to such irrational thinking:
Bennett’s comments came in response to a caller who suggested that Social Security would be in better financial shape if abortion were illegal, leaving more people to pay into the system. Bennett cautioned against making such far-reaching arguments and drove home his point by offering what he called “a noxious hypothetical analogy” to reducing crime by aborting black children.
Unfortunately the whole comment in context does not fit the Left’s agenda of tagging Republicans as racist. So they creatively snip the comment to fit their argument.
Here are Bennett’s comments as the Left portrayed them:
“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 …”
and here’s the whole comment:
“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…”
He then goes on to say these kinds of data extrapolations and causal links made by the authors were “far reaching” and “tricky”. Bennett’s response:
Anyone paying attention to this debate should be offended by those who have selectively quoted me, distorted my meaning, and taken out of context the dialogue I engaged in this week. Such distortions from ‘leaders’ of organizations and parties is a disgrace not only to the organizations and institutions they serve, but to the First Amendment.
But the liberals, like the DNC talking points tell them to do, leave off the tail end of the quote, which provides the context to the statement… the context that Bennett was calling the author’s conclusions ridiculous (and thereby warning the caller who made the abortion/social security link about making such a ridiculous link). But they don’t want to see such context, because it doesn’t fit in their agenda of calling Republicans racist.
So the race-baiting liberals can go on back and enjoy the likes of minority-friendly representatives like Robert “KKK Kleagle” Byrd and Howard “I want to be the candidate for guy with confederate flags in their trucks” Dean.
