Or you could throw gamblers straight into prison (But We Must All Adopt One Political Philosophy Or The Other One. It Is Commanded So.)
Rut roh:
The White House on Friday criticized former Education Secretary William Bennett for remarks linking the crime rate and the abortion of black babies....
Bennett, on his radio show, "Morning in America," was answering a caller's question when he took issue with the hypothesis put forth in a recent book that one reason crime is down is that abortion is up.
"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," said Bennett, author of "The Book of Virtues."
He went on to call that "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."
Well, the Communists weighed in:
William Bennett has clearly shown that not all racist pigs in today's society feel the urge to don white sheets or bear swastikas on their arms.
And this person, by not completely condemning Bennett, is obviously a baby seal clubber:
An author argues that a high abortion rate will lead to a lower crime rates....Bennett agrees that this basic correlation exists: there would be fewer crimes committed in this country if we killed all of those who were young, poor, and black. But Bennett also says that to do such a thing would be "impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible".
So what exactly are we getting mad at Bennett for? In the first part, Bennett is simply stating a fact, a statistical correlation that seems likely to be true. Correlation does not imply causality, however; to state the fact that African Americans are more likely than whites to be convicted of crimes does not mean that there is any direct correlation between being black and having a predilection to commit crime.... And we certainly wouldn't be getting mad at Bennett for saying that to actually encourage abortion of African Americans would be an evil thing to do.
It seems to me that we are mad at Bennett for exposing the skeletons in our own closet. His comments evoked memories of a time in this country where black sterilization actually occurred; where it was a common thought among certain segments of white America that we could eliminate the race problem in America by simply eliminating the black population in America. Sort of a genocide in slow-motion. His comments also remind us that our racial problems are not a thing of the past; that white and black Americans act differently and are treated differently, in ways that are hard to measure and for reasons that we don't understand. Republicans want to ignore race as a problem and hope it goes away, while Democrats want to push affirmative action programs whose time has seemingly past. Neither solution is a good one, and we have yet to come up with a set of reasonable alternatives.
Unfortunately, this isn't analysis that you are likely to get on the news. It's all too easy to simply crucify Bennett as a racist for saying things that he didn't actually say, and then to go on ignoring the problem....Bennett's comments make for fabulously terrible headlines ("Former Education Secretary Says We Can Reduce Crime By Aborting Black Babies"), and so that's all you're likely to get.
But this baby seal clubber doesn't stick to the script:
...[A] friend of mine recently tipped me off to the fact that the House Majority Leader is Tom Delay, the House Majority Whip is Roy Blunt and one of the House Majority Deputy Whips is John Doolittle.
So, the republican leadership can be summed up as delay, blunt, and doolittle....
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