"Media Matters"; by Jamison Foser
| This Week: False pro-DeLay spin dominates news coverage of his indictment |
Bill Bennett widely condemned for linking black abortions and crime rate -- but not by some prominent conservatives
After Media Matters for America drew attention to former Reagan administration education secretary and current radio host Bill Bennett's claim that "[Y]ou could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down," Bennett was widely criticized by civil rights organizations, congressional Democrats, and the White House -- but defended by some prominent conservatives.
During the September 28 broadcast of his radio show, Bennett responded to a caller who suggested a baseless link between legalized abortion and projected shortfalls in the Social Security system by claiming that aborting all black children would reduce the crime level:
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.
Bennett's comments have been widely condemned as "not appropriate," "outrageous," "reflect[ing] a spirit of hate and division," "nothing short of callous and ignorant," and "toxic rhetoric."
But some prominent conservative commentators are standing by Bennett. National Review Online contributor Andrew McCarthy claims Bennett "was right" and calls criticism of Bennett "shameful." Landmark Legal Foundation president and National Review Online contributing editor Mark Levin accused Media Matters of "smear[ing] a thoroughly decent man who harbors no racial prejudice of any kind." The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto called Media Matters "ragemongers." Levin and Taranto made no effort to explain how simply posting audio and a transcript of Bill Bennett saying something stupid constitutes a "smear" or "rage mongering." NRO's John Podhoretz claims Bennett is the victim of a "monstrous injustice." Rush Limbaugh derided Media Matters as a "Democrat [sic] hack website" and claimed that we took Bennett out of context.
Bennett himself stands by his comments, saying he is the one who is owed an apology. Bennett and his defenders have seized on Bennett's original statement that it would be "impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible" to actually abort all black babies. But that isn't the issue; of course everyone understands that Bill Bennett doesn't want to abort all black babies. The issue is that Bennett, upon thinking "crime rate," immediately thought of black people. The issue is that Bennett thinks and speaks of crime as an issue of race. Steven D. Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics -- the book Bennett claims he was paraphrasing -- has specifically and emphatically contradicted such a link:
Race is not an important part of the abortion-crime argument that John Donohue and I have made in academic papers and that [Stephen J.] Dubner and I discuss in Freakonomics. It is true that, on average, crime involvement in the U.S. is higher among blacks than whites. Importantly, however, once you control for income, the likelihood of growing up in a female-headed household, having a teenage mother, and how urban the environment is, the importance of race disappears for all crimes except homicide. (The homicide gap is partly explained by crack markets). In other words, for most crimes a white person and a black person who grow up next door to each other with similar incomes and the same family structure would be predicted to have the same crime involvement. Empirically, what matters is the fact that abortions are disproportionately used on unwanted pregnancies, and disproportionately by teenage women and single women.
[...]
I mean it when I say that, from a purely fact-based and statistical perspective, race is not in any way central to our arguments about abortion and crime.
Bennett's defense of his comments as being based on the book Freakonomics is baseless, as the author of that book has pointed out. And the defense that he wasn't actually advocating aborting all black babies is irrelevant: The controversy surrounding his comments is largely based on the fact that he was making broad claims about race and crime rather than class and crime -- not on whether or not anyone thinks Bill Bennett wants to abort all black children.
Bennett's radio show is distributed by the Salem Radio Network, whose parent company is Salem Communications. The company's CEO, Ed Atsinger, is a Bush Pioneer (read: has raised more than $100,000 for Bush's political campaigns) and a major figure in both Republican and Christian Right circles; the company's PAC donates only to Republicans. You can read more here.
Media Matters' complete coverage of the Bennett controversy can be found here.
False pro-DeLay spin dominates news coverage of his indictment
Following the indictment of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) on conspiracy charges, false and misleading pro-DeLay spin has dominated news coverage. The claim -- debunked long ago by Media Matters -- that prosecutor Ronnie Earle is a "partisan zealot" has resurfaced (again and again and again) despite the fact that Earle has prosecuted four times as many Democrats and Republicans. Newspapers have reported DeLay's denial of "day-to-day" involvement in the operations of the political action committee Texans for a Republican Majority, upon which the indictment is based -- but have not noted evidence, including internal emails, that suggests this denial is untrue.
New York Times columnist David Brooks, meanwhile, suggested that DeLay's replacement, Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO), could "loosen the [ethical] baggage on the [Republican] party" -- overlooking or ignoring the fact that Blunt faces significant ethics questions of his own. As Media Matters explained:
Many of the ethics charges against Blunt concern his dubious efforts to use his position to benefit members of his family. For example, in 2003 Blunt sought a provision to Homeland Security legislation that would have benefited a company that had contributed approximately $150,000 to his campaign committees and that employed his son and future wife as lobbyists. As Knight Ridder reported on September 28, the provision aimed at "crack[ing] down on illegal and Internet-based cigarette sales," which was eventually removed from the bill by other House leaders, would have been a "huge boon to Altria, parent of cigarette maker Philip Morris." At the time, Blunt had a "personal relationship" with Altria lobbyist Abigail Perlman, according to a September 29 Associated Press report; Blunt and Perlman later married.
Blunt's lobbyist son, Andrew, also represents the United Parcel Service, which benefited from an amendment inserted at Roy Blunt's behest into an Iraq spending bill in 2002, according to a September 29 Associated Press report.
Other ethics charges have focused on Blunt's other son, Matt, who was elected Missouri governor in 2004. For example, the Springfield (Missouri) News-Leader reported on August 10, 2003, about a "series of transactions in which a campaign committee controlled by the congressman [Roy Blunt] had contributed $50,000 to a state 7th District Congressional Republican Committee, which then gave $40,000 to Matt Blunt's campaign eight days later." The News-Leader also documented that "[a]nother committee controlled by the congressman, called Rely On Your Beliefs, or ROY B., also gave money to the 7th District Congressional Republican committee," and was "eventually fined $3,000 for improperly giving money to state candidates in Missouri, according to a consent order between the committee's treasurer and the state Ethics Commission."
Further, The Washington Post reported on May 17 that Matt Blunt "awarded one of the few remaining patronage plums in the state" (franchises to collect fees for driver's license renewals, tax payments for new cars and processing motor vehicle titles and registrations that can provide recipients with as much as $1 million over four years) to the wife and brother-in-law of U.S. Attorney Todd P. Graves, whose office has jurisdiction over Roy Blunt's congressional district. The Post noted that, in response to Democratic complaints, the associate deputy attorney general determined that there was "no existing conflict of interest that requires further action at this time."
As with DeLay, there is evidence that Roy Blunt is connected to Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who is currently the subject of a criminal investigation led by the Justice Department. As The Washington Post documented on March 13, Blunt joined DeLay and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) in signing a letter threatening to hold Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton accountable if she failed to benefit Abramoff's client, the Louisiana Coushatta tribe, by blocking a bid by another Native American tribe to develop a casino in Louisiana.
Media Matters' full coverage of the coverage of DeLay's indictment can be found here.
In midst of disastrous year for Republicans, Newsweek's Fineman focuses on reasons for Democrats to be "gloomy"
2005 hasn't been the smoothest year for the Republican Party; as an incomplete and cursory review of the past several months makes clear:
- House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has been indicted.
- His replacement, Roy Blunt, "has been dogged by ethics issues."
- Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors for possible insider trading, lied about what he knew about his stock, and may have broken Senate ethics rules.
- The Bush administration's head of procurement was arrested at his home.
- Bush's top political aide and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff are tangled up in an investigation of the potentially illegal outing of a covert CIA operative - an outing that may have had grave consequences for national security.
- Bush's approval ratings are abysmal.
- The American people think he and his administration bungled the handling of Hurricane Katrina.
- His major second-term domestic priority, privatization of Social Security, appears to be dead, as House Republicans are "struggling on an exit strategy."
- A senior House Republican announced that he will not seek-re-election in the wake of a federal grand jury investigation of financial transactions between him and a defense contractor to whom he steered government funds.
- Another senior House Republican has been caught up in a Senate ethics investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
- Polling indicates that a significant plurality of the public plans to vote for Democratic candidates for Congress next year.
So, naturally, Newsweek's Howard Fineman looks around, assesses the political landscape ... and concludes that Democrats "are gloomy" -- with, he argues, good reason.
Yes, at a time when it seems that half the Republicans in Washington are being fitted for orange jumpsuits, Howard Fineman argues that Democrats are in trouble.
Among Fineman's reasons for this odd conclusion:
Lack of star power
These things go in cycles, I guess, and it's hard to be glamorous when you are in the minority in both houses of Congress. That said, it's incontestably true that the Democrats simply aren't blessed with much charisma in the leadership ranks -- unless you consider Angelina Jolie a Democrat.
The GOP has Rudy, Colin, Arnold, McCain and Condi -- just to name a few: big, bold, controversial characters. Good copy if nothing else. The more or less official roster of titular Democratic leaders includes Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean and 2004 nominee John Kerry. 'Nuff said.
Fineman makes a dishonest apples-to-oranges comparison: to illustrate the purported lack of "star power" among Democrats, Fineman pretends eligible Democrats are limited to the "more or less official roster of titular Democratic leaders" -- conveniently allowing him to exclude Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton (who can't be excluded on the grounds that he is ineligible to run for president; after all, Fineman included Arnold Schwarzenegger).
But to illustrate the vast array of charismatic "star" Republicans, Fineman casts a much broader net, listing (in order) someone who holds no elective office; someone who has never hold elective office and currently holds no office of any kind; a governor who holds no leadership position in the party, is out of step with the actual leadership of the Republican party on many issues, and has an approval rating even worse than Bush's; a senator despised by many in his own party; and a woman who has never held elective office.
Fineman's comparison is simply dishonest. What is the rationale for including Schwarzenegger but not Bill Clinton? McCain but not Obama? Powell but not Edwards? Rice but not Hillary Clinton? There isn't one -- or, at least, Fineman doesn't even try to offer one: He just stacks the deck.
Even Fineman seems to realize that his exclusion of Hillary Clinton is bizarre at best and dishonest at worst. The next item on his laundry list of purported reasons why Democrats' prospects are dim is an attempt to marginalize Clinton:
Hillary love and fear
The purported inevitability of Hillary Rodham Clinton excites some Democrats, but deeply depresses some others, both inside and outside the Beltway.
Her forcefulness and talent -- not to mention her well-oiled money machine -- bring respect from party insiders and outsiders alike. But there is an undercurrent of unease about the Back to the Future quality of another Clinton candidacy. Do we really want to relive the Clinton Years? Under their breath, even many Clinton acolytes tend to say "NO."
Notice the wiggle words Fineman uses in making the wholly unsubstantiated claim that that Clinton loyalists don't want to "relive the Clinton Years." "Many" Clinton acolytes "tend" to say this -- under their breath, of course.
How many are "many"? How frequently do they "tend" to do this? Basically: who are they? Fineman avoids actually naming any (or, a cynic might argue, he gets around admitting that by "many Clinton acolytes," he means "Dick Morris") by conveniently claiming they express their reluctance "under their breath."
This is an old trick of Fineman's; he has a knack for supposedly finding Democrats who will criticize their old boss - off the record, of course. As Bob Somerby pointed out on his Daily Howler weblog at the time, Fineman wrote an extraordinary 2001 column in which he claimed "some top people who worked for Al Gore privately tell me they are glad (relieved might be a better word) that George Bush -- not Bill Clinton's veep -- is in the White House now." Somerby noted that Fineman "quotes no one by name." He simply made the extraordinary claim that Al Gore's top aides were glad George Bush won the 2000 election. (See also this unrelated Somerby post about Fineman and Gore.)
Pundits like Fineman were always out of touch with the American people when it came to the Clintons. When the public stood by Clinton in 1998, during Kenneth Starr's investigation of the Lewinsky matter, Washington pundits were outraged -- Fineman included. Conservative author and former Bush aide David Frum described Fineman's reaction in a January 27, 1998, Financial Post article:
You almost have to be in Washington to appreciate the seriousness of what happened here last week. After years -- years -- of being lied to and manipulated by U.S. President Bill Clinton, the Washington press has sickened of the man. On Friday, I heard something that caused me to pull my car over to the side of the road in surprise: Howard Fineman, editor of Newsweek, on the Rush Limbaugh show, thanked Limbaugh for his work over the past five years keeping public indignation against Clinton boiling. We have to wonder, Fineman said, whether we can continue to respect ourselves as a people if a man like this remains president.
Fineman is entitled to his opinions, of course. But one has to wonder whether the throngs of former Clinton-Gore aides lined up outside his office, ready and willing to trash their old bosses, is real -- or made-up in an attempt provide support for his own opinions. And one has to wonder how it is possible to gaze upon the smoldering wreckage of the Republican Party and conclude that Democrats have good reason to be gloomy.
It looks like those doing the condemning read the headlines and not the whole article, whereas prominent conservatives probably did what we should all do, our own research before flying off the handle. I flew off the handle a couple of days ago on this subject because I got in a hurry and didn't go beyond the headline. If anyone expects Bennett to apologize, perhaps they should look for the same from some of the condemners also.
You don't think Bennet should apologize for suggesting that Blacks are racially predetermined to cause more crime?
I think Bennet should apologize to every American who believes that people deserve to be judged on their own merits and not on their skin color.
CT, it appears to me that you have not read the whole transcript yet. Please do that. Bennett follows the statement everybody is so worked up about with the following (paraphrased to save space) "It would be impossible, ridiculous and a morally reprehenisble thing to do. ....far-reaching extensive extrapolations are tricky......." He could have used the same argument and substituted White, Asian, Hispanic for Black and the argument that the crime rate would go down would probably still hold true. It is a definite fact that the AA population in criminal confinment system exceeds the % of general population, so one could conclude his argument is correct. But adding the two sentences following, I read that he believes the issue is much deeper than ethnic background, etc. But in this country, you have the right to be outraged and to express that outrage (isn't that great?). But please go read the whole transcript (and if possible listen to an audio of the whole exchange). I did and it changed my viewpoint some.
Yeah, I know this is hard for you to believe but I read and listened to the whole segment including the part where Bennet strongly disagrees with genocide. You apparently think Bennet's anti-genocide stance makes him some sort of right-wing Saint. You need to realize, however, that Bennet's argument relies on the explicitly racist premise that blacks are predisposed to criminal activity. You aren't offended by this racist premise because you accept it as true also:
Your accusations that I haven't listened to the Bennet clip illustrates just how clueless you are; The reason we disagree about Bennet isn't because on of us has a misunderstanding about what he said. We disagree because you have internalized racism to the point that you can't even understand why Bennet's remarks were racist.
Look, I don't care what other pacifying comments Bennett added to his outrageous remarks about black people and crime, he shouldn't have suggested that in the first place. His comments were neither philosophical nor educational, those comments were nonsensically designed to elicit racial tension, as if America needs a new catalyst to galvanise its war-ready black/white divide.
Can somebody, republican or democrat explain to me what the color of one's skin has to do with crime rate?
You don't think Bennet should apologize for suggesting that Blacks are racially predetermined to cause more crime?
Apologize for saying an uncomfortable truth? No.
Blacks are, to use your language, "racially predetermined" to cause more crime. Put another way, if you sell insurance policies that pay a parent money if his or her child is incarcerated for a felony, you had better charge black parents more money, or you will go out of business. (You should chage parents of male children more, too, by the way.) You might wish the statistics were otherwise, but that doesn't make it so. Here's a logically equivilent way that Bennett could have made is point that wouldn't have raised a single liberal eyebrow.
CALLER: And if we hadn't aborted all those fetuses, we woulnd't have such a big problem paying social security to all those baby boom retirees.
BENNETT: That might be true in a purely statistical sense, but that's not an ethically acceptable way to argue. It's like saying "if we aborted all male fetuses, the crime rate would go down". That might be statistically true, but that isn't an acceptable argument to do it.
I see. You don't think Bennet is being unfairly construed as a racist, but rather you believe that racism is a legitimate viewpoint and reflects a fundamental truth.
I'm proud to say that I believe individuals should be judged on their own merits rather than their complexion. I'm glad America is progressing and that primitive racist viewpoints, once commonplace, are becoming increasingly marginalized.
I made no statement about how anyone "should be judged." I asserted that it is a fact that a larger percentage of blacks commit crimes than non-blacks in the U.S.
Do you claim that this is not true?
Or do you claim that, even though it is true, it is racist to say it?
You're attributing criminal behavior to people who don't even exist yet. That is a judgement.
You claimed more than you currently admit. You claimed that in the future you could hypothetically reduce crime by getting rid of the blacks. That isn't "a fact", it's your racist opinion. Consider: there was a once time when Italians committed more crime per capita than other Americans. Now Italians commit less crime per capita than other Americans. So at some point in the past people could have made the same predictions as you & Bennet are making with the same justification that you have, and they would have been demonstratably wrong.
It astonishes me that an educated man needs to have the folly of race-based reasoning explained to him.
"there was a once time when Italians committed more crime per capita than other Americans. Now Italians commit less crime per capita than other Americans." -clarence thomas-
Can you verify those two statements with statistics? While I believe its indisputable that the "Mafia" was and probably still is made up of mostly Italians, many more Italians were never involved with that organization. Of course there is the Irish mafia, and Russian mafia, in fact it seems many ethnic groups have their own version of that type of criminal organization.
Are you saying that today in America-- Italians, rather than say the Irish, or Polish, Greeks, or French commit fewer crimes? Is data like that available?
I'm curious where you found this information.
From your response, I take it that you do admit the fact that crime rates are higher among blacks that non-blacks, at this time an in this country. (So it looks like option 2: this fact is true, but its racist for me to say it.)
You seem to think that I, and Bennett, are additionally asserting that this fact is immutable and biologically determined. I certainly do not want to make this claim. And Bennett doesn't make that claim in the tanscript, nor does he need it in order to make his argument.
Bennett's argument is just a simple mathematical-ethical story problem. Look, a program of forced abortions would at very least increase criminality because it would spark an armed revolt. But the logic of the story problem is much simpler: compute and compare the total crime rate in societies consisting of different mixtures of populations with different crime rates. The story problem doesn't require you do know anything about the root causes of those different crime rates.
What I find most amusing in this discussion is that your point, as far as I can see, is the same as Bennett's. Both of you assert that, regardless of what statistics apply to the behavior of groups of people, it is immoral to judge individuals except on their own merits. So why aren't you contratualting Bennett for agreeing with you?
Oh I hate labels, what do you mean by "liberal eyebrows", Bill Bennett's comments should offend everybody. Why is there a disproportionate number of AA in prison than their % in the general population? is it an economic situation, a question for political economics or a philosophical problem. Because it is certainly not an anatomic question (this you must agree), then Bennett's premise is purely racist.
I make no assertion about whether the increased crime rate among AA is a biologic, economic, or cultural phenonemon. And neither did Bennett! The only premise Bennett needs for his argument is the simple statistical fact about relative crime rates.
Bennett's argument is just a simple mathematical-ethical story problem that works for any population where some undesirable behavior C is more prevelent in population A than B. Unfortunately he choose A, B, and C in such a way that people's passions were inflamed. Using men instead of blacks just allows people to see the fundamental logic of the argument without the inflamed passions. Do you really think if Bennett had used my logicaly equivilent example that the same people would be up in arms about Bennett's "sexism"?
From The Daily Howler via PRE$$TITUTES: [link to www.presstitutes.com]
The section on Fineman and the 'gloomy Democrats' is truly a gem of contemporary political media analysis. My kudos to Jamison Foster on this one. And I am often critical of Media Matters for focusing disproportionately on the likes of Limbaugh and O'Reilly (OK, we get it, they make up stuff), and not enough on the mainstream. But this is a homerun. I think it should be rewritten into a submitted op-ed piece for the NY Times, and other possible avenues of mainstream publicization of the material in it.
Yet there is a further layer I would note. The Republican Party has been running on machine politics now for decades. The era of the public really being swung to the right (tho as Michael Ansara noted in the 70s, they were being "taken to the right") is long over, Kansas matters notwithstanding. Now whatever degree of genuine rightward drift of public opinion has been peaked now about two decades ago, and the system has been functioning on machine manipulations ever since. It's not that justifying the lying was invented in the mid-80s, but now the entire world of political discourse in the US is completely and artificially dependent on it.
In that context, things can get pretty bad for the Repugs, and as long as the Democratic Party is devoted to throwing elections (1988, 1994, 2000, 2004) and then standing aside when that is insufficient and letting them be stolen (2000 and 2004), with a media lockdown in 2004, the problem of politics is very different from the horserace that even political critics are apt to assume it to be. It may be that the politics of W Bush is like a Manchurian candidate programmed to discredit conservatism, but W is just the culmination of Reaganism and Bush Sr imperialism. And so far the conservatives, recently getting 78 votes in the Senate for Roberts, have not paid for it politically at all. Instead they have shat down the blame.
The question is what forces can or will get the Democrats to stop 'doing the job' by throwing elections, and the press, including Fineman, so devotedly getting with the program by justifying the lying?
Of course, Republicans simply can't be winning on their own merits, but because they cheat, and because of the Democrats' lack of will to win and incompetence. Now transfer this scenario to a football game: say San Francisco vs. Dallas. San Francisco loses 3 out of 4. Joe Fan on the street, with his beer belly, blue collar job, and big screen TV next to his wife's thimble collection, complains its because the 49ers just suck: they quit, or they made mistakes that Joe Fan recognizes. A 'homer' fan, or indeed the media covering the losing team, will tend to focus on how lousy their team is without giving due credit to their opponents.
Now multiply the football game analogy several times and you have the reaction of the Democratic rank and file to the past few elections. The 'Repugs' must have no redeeming qualities, as this might disturb the purity of the True Faith. Others have said it before me, but until the Democratic Party can figure out what part of its message that is not resonating with voters and alter it, - and conversely figure out why Republicans have had their successes (beyond dubious asertions of cheating that most Americans don't but, or divisive vituperation: that Americans are just too stupid or that there are too many rednecks) more elections will continue to be lost. And as long as this many Americans feel that the Democratic Party looks down on them, is weak on defense, and is riddled with extremism, tis will continue to happen, despite increasingly improbable rationalizations about the irredemably evil, yet somehow unbeatable, "Repugs".
www.postmodernspectator.com
"Unbeatable"? They are not unbeatable. [sighs at lack of optimism, however naive optimism may be at this point.]
- to gaze upon the smoldering wreckage of the Republican Party - jamison foser ================================================================
What an absolutely baseless statement. Republicans firmly in control of both houses of congress. Republicans firmly in control of governorships. Pres.Bush nominating conservative judges. No poll in sight that proclaims any democrat as a likely winner in the 2008 presidential election.
His opinion and poorly formulated.
anyone else see the lead headline on buzzflash? seems someone told stephanopoulos that bush and cheney may be a little more involved in plamegate than was thought.
I think Bill Bennet could help his case, if he said he failed to make the same dinstinction that the author of Freakonomics made. That is categorically eliminating any group based on race would reduce crime.
I find it intesting that Bennet rejected the author's hypothesis, went on ahead and claimed aborting a group of people would reduce crime (which is self contradictory) and would go on to say it was morally reprehensible. Why make such a distinction in race if he won't explain why it is immoral?
The man just lacks tact.
As the list grows, Sen. Byrd's speech of May 2003 seems more and more prophetic: "Truth has a way of asserting itself despite all attempts to obscure it. Distortion only serves to derail it for a time. No matter to what lengths we humans may go to obfuscate facts or delude our fellows, truth has a way of squeezing out through the cracks, eventually......[snip]........And mark my words, the calculated intimidation which we see so often of late by the "powers that be" will only keep the loyal opposition quiet for just so long. Because eventually, like it always does, the truth will emerge. And when it does, this house of cards, built of deceit, will fall. [link to www.commondreams.org]
It is difficult to defend Bennett's comments. If it is morally reprehensible, ridiculous and impossible to abort black babies, then why suggest it? unless that is what you really would like to materialize. A psuedo-moral jingoist like Bill Bennett has no place in any serious discussion about crime and race, he lacks the intellectual capacity to engage in such a sensitive discourse.
His opinion and poorly formulated.
by rocketman - Saturday October 1, 2005 07:17:54 PM EST
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Your opinion, poorly formulated, Rocketman.
What polls have you seen matching up any Democrats against any Republicans for 2008?
If you can cite one, and no Democrat is shown beating any Republican, then maybe I'll agree with you.
I think people are starting to remember why they kept these clowns out of power in Congress for 40 years. Maybe it'll be 100 this time.