Bill Bennett's Hypothetical Proposition

[Pete C]

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/09/...nts/index.html

[rollhead]

It's every Republican's wet dream.

[RainyDay]

They were talking about it this morning on CSPAN but I never caught what he had actually said. Clueless son of a bitch. The only thing more ignorant than his remarks are the people, including Bennett, who defend them as not racist. How in hell could this country ever have a dialogue about race when someone like Bennett an make these remarks and the wagons circle to defend him? He makes a racist comment and then covers it by saying it would be reprehensible. But the primary assumptions still stands: Black people are responsible for crime in America. How fortunate for Bennett to have been born white and to be above the sleazy world of crime. This proves that for some whites, there is no racism. Just doesn't exist. It's a fabrication by lazy, criminal, depraved black people who want something for nothing. Jesus, I'm so fucking sick of this stupid shit.

[Paul B]

It's appalling. And as Rainy hints, a malignly subtle way to make a nefarious point: say it, then claim you're only talking about a "hypothesis," which you can then deny. And your right-wing pals can join in the chorus of denial. But the ugly point has still been made.

Wonder how Monte feels about his party when its true colors shine like this...

[lynn]

That in this country, someone would verbalize a comment like this just tells you the lights are off the the roaches are running the house. Too bad somebody didn't abort Ken Lay and the rest of the sorry ass white collar criminals before they were born.

Lack of education is the big problem and I guess you can point that finger at Bennett.

[Coda]

x

[walto]

Would it be morally reprehensible (though true) for me to suggest that if that Bennett should ever remove his ugly, pompous, ignorant, know-it-all head from his flabby ass no one would be able to tell the difference?

[rollhead]

Originally Posted by Coda

my finger is pointing at your comments.

Did anyone see where he said that it was a repugnant idea to propose this, but that by extending statistical data one could come to that conclusion?

Did you ever stop to consider that "extending the statistical data" to require all women to abort their babies that -- the national crime rate would drop to zero?

[rollhead]

Originally Posted by lynn

That in this country, someone would verbalize a comment like this just tells you the lights are off the the roaches are running the house. Too bad somebody didn't abort Ken Lay and the rest of the sorry ass white collar criminals before they were born.

Lack of education is the big problem and I guess you can point that finger at Bennett.

Damn, why can't I write like lynn?

[Doc Martin]

Originally Posted by rollhead

Did you ever stop to consider that "extending the statistical data" to require all women to abort their babies that -- the national crime rate would drop to zero?

That's correct, it's axiomatic that, if you aborted all the babies of any distinctly identifiable group -- blacks, whites, French, left-handed golfers, Red Soxs fans, Veterinarians etc. -- then the crime rate would, in fact, go down . . . by the exact proportion to which that group's members contribute to the crime rate, plus or minus when accounting for other factors.

That, of course, wasn't what Bennett was saying. He was saying the black people commit all the crime.

[JamesH]

Originally Posted by Coda

my finger is pointing at your comments.

Did anyone see where he said that it was a repugnant idea to propose this, but that by extending statistical data one could come to that conclusion?

My middle finger is pointing upwards in your direction.

I wonder what your reaction would be if a black formerly highly placed politician from Clinton's administration said that since whites are responsible for the majority of crime in America (a fact) then it would reduce crime [even more substantially] to abort all white American children. Oh, it's morally reprehensible but still a logically concluded fact.

What would your reaction be? How about the American media's reaction?

[JamesH]

Originally Posted by Doc Martin

That's correct, it's axiomatic that, if you aborted all the babies of any distinctly identifiable group -- blacks, whites, French, left-handed golfers, Red Soxs fans, Veterinarians etc. -- then the crime rate would, in fact, go down . . . by the exact proportion to which that group's members contribute to the crime rate, plus or minus when accounting for other factors.

That, of course, wasn't what Bennett was saying. He was saying the black people commit all the crime.

Though I think you make a great point I'm going to disagree for the sake of going beyond your logic.

One of the things that makes America run the way it does is the firmly entrenched establishment of a lower class. A group that supports the corporate system through consumption but is, due to lack of education and opportunities not nearly as competitive as they should be. In other words a group that passively supports the priviledged classs.

If blacks didn't exist a major portion of the support system would need to be replenished. My guess is that violent crime would go up to install this new group. Since Hispanics are in large part already a firmly entrenched underclass another group would have to be picked. Asians perhaps, Irish, Italians who knows. But someone who isn't black now would have to be the new black. And my guess is that losing ground in the American caste system would cause a great deal of increased crime.

[walto]

Sorry, Doc (and Rollie), no axiom there (you can put me back on ignore if necessary) since, presumably the "rate" is the # crimes divided by the # of people.

But James is probably right, and even if he weren't, I think the crime rate should go up in such a case, because somebody should be putting the hurt on all the bastards who are trying to prevent the births of all those wanted babies.

[Gentle Giant]

[walto]

Oh, how I hate that stupid, pompous gasbag.

[JamesH]

Maybe the next edition of the book with the children on the cover should have a black circle with a line through the face of the black boy.

[Doc Martin]

Originally Posted by walto

(you can put me back on ignore if necessary)

Nah!

[Doc Martin]

Originally Posted by JamesH

Though I think you make a great point I'm going to disagree for the sake of going beyond your logic.

One of the things that makes America run the way it does is the firmly entrenched establishment of a lower class. A group that supports the corporate system through consumption but is, due to lack of education and opportunities not nearly as competitive as they should be. In other words a group that passively supports the priviledged classs.

If blacks didn't exist a major portion of the support system would need to be replenished. My guess is that violent crime would go up to install this new group. Since Hispanics are in large part already a firmly entrenched underclass another group would have to be picked. Asians perhaps, Irish, Italians who knows. But someone who isn't black now would have to be the new black. And my guess is that losing ground in the American caste system would cause a great deal of increased crime.

You have a point there.

Originally Posted by walto

Oh, how I hate that stupid, pompous gasbag.

There was an essay some years back, maybe by Kinsley for Slate, called The Laziest Man in America. It discussed how little 'work' he's actually had to do to become this best-selling editor (not author, he doesn't actually write those best-selling books) and morals maven. Just get some interns to collate some historically famous essays, get PBS to give you a series because they need to look ideologically balanced, and also get yourself on TV talk shows as much as possible (as the pretentious scold we can count on for some sound bites). Basically, the only 'work' this guy does is at the craps table.

[rollhead]

Bennett's hypothetical proposal may have come out of a reading of the book "Freakonomics," by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner -- or more likely his reading of an article about it in American Conservative magazine;

http://www.amconmag.com/2005_05_09/feature.html

http://www.freakonomics.com/

Levitt, an economist, suggests that the force behind the recent fall in the national crime rate began when abortion was legalized in the 70s.

That is disputable.

What is pretty much accepted is the statistic that black women are more than 3 times as likely as white women to have an abortion, and Hispanic women are 2 1/2 times as likely.

[Gordon B]

Originally Posted by walto

Oh, how I hate that stupid, pompous gasbag.

He's a pompous hypocrite but he's not guilty of what he's been accused of saying.

Brad DeLong, a very smart liberal economist who thinks Bush should be impeached, likes Krugman, and worked in the first Clinton Administration, wrote the following in his blog today.

In Defense of Bill Bennett

Bill Bennett is a hypocrite, a loathsome fungus on the tree of American politics, a man who has worked unceasingly to make America a worse place--when he's not publishing the work of others under his own name, or rolling the dice at Las Vegas while claiming that America's poor would be rich if only they had the righteousness and moral fiber than he does.

But Bill Bennett is not afflicted with genocidal fantasies about ethnically cleansing African-Americans. The claim that he is is completely, totally wrong. This:
link to blog entry

I originally posted in full, but the formatting was lost in the pasting, possibly leading to a misunderstanding of what DeLong was saying so I inserted the link.

[walto]

Maybe, Gordon. I'm biased. I really hate that guy.

I tried, but couldn't find the piece Adam recommended, but I did come up with this:

Bill Bennett's Bad Bet
The bookmaker of virtues.
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Sunday, May 4, 2003, at 5:34 PM PT



http://<font face="Tahoma">[img]...1;/img]</font>Slipping into the vice slot

Sinners have long cherished the fantasy that William Bennett, the virtue magnate, might be among our number. The news over the weekend—that Bennett's $50,000 sermons and best-selling moral instruction manuals have financed a multimillion dollar gambling habit—has lit a lamp of happiness in even the darkest hearts. As the joyous word spread, crack flowed like water through inner-city streets, family court judges began handing out free divorces, children lit bonfires of The Book of Virtues, More Virtuous Virtues, Who Cheesed My Virtue?, Moral Tails: Virtue for Dogs, etc. And cynics everywhere thought, for just a moment: Maybe there is a God after all.

If there were a Pulitzer Prize for schadenfreude (joy in the suffering of others), Newsweek's Jonathan Alter and Joshua Green of the Washington Monthly would surely deserve it for bringing us this story. They are shoo-ins for the public service category in any event. Schadenfreude is an unvirtuous emotion of which we should be ashamed. Bill Bennett himself was always full of sorrow when forced to point out the moral failings of other public figures. But the flaws of his critics don't absolve Bennett of his own.

Let's also be honest that gambling would not be our first-choice vice if we were designing this fantasy-come-true from scratch. But gambling will do. It will definitely do. Bill Bennett has been exposed as a humbug artist who ought to be pelted off the public stage if he lacks the decency to slink quietly away, as he is constantly calling on others to do. Although it may be impossible for anyone famous to become permanently discredited in American culture (a Bennett-like point I agree with), Bennett clearly deserves that distinction. There are those who will try to deny it to him. They will say:

1) He never specifically criticized gambling.This, if true, doesn't show that Bennett is not a hypocrite. It just shows that he's not a complete idiot. Working his way down the list of other people's pleasures, weaknesses, and uses of American freedom, he just happened to skip over his own. How convenient. Is there some reason why his general intolerance of the standard vices does not apply to this one? None that he's ever mentioned.

Open, say, Bennett's The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American Family, and read about how Americans overvalue "unrestricted personal liberty." How we must relearn to "enter judgments on a whole range of behaviors and attitudes." About how "wealth and luxury ... often make it harder to deny the quest for instant gratification" because "the more we attain, the more we want." How would you have guessed, last week, that Bennett would regard a man who routinely "cycle[s] several hundred thousand dollars in an evening" (his own description) sitting in an airless Las Vegas casino pumping coins into a slot machine or video game? Well, you would have guessed wrong! He thinks it's perfectly OK as long as you don't spend the family milk money.

2) His gambling never hurt anyone else. This is, of course, the classic libertarian standard of permissible behavior, and I think it's a good one. If a hypocrite is a person who says one thing and does another, the problem with Bennett is what he says—not (as far as we know) what he does. Bennett can't plead liberty now because opposing libertarianism is what his sundry crusades are all about. He wants to put marijuana smokers in jail. He wants to make it harder to get divorced. He wants more "moral criticism of homosexuality" and "declining to accept that what they do is right."

In all these cases, Bennett wants laws against or heightened social disapproval of activities that have no direct harmful effects on anyone except the participants. He argues that the activities in question are encouraging other, more harmful activities or are eroding general social norms in some vague way. Empower America, one of Bennett's several shirt-pocket mass movements, officially opposes the spread of legalized gambling, and the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, one of Bennett's cleverer PR conceits, includes "problem" gambling as a negative indicator of cultural health. So, Bennett doesn't believe that gambling is harmless. He just believes that his own gambling is harmless. But by the standards he applies to everything else, it is not harmless.

Bennett has been especially critical of libertarian sentiments coming from intellectuals and the media elite. Smoking a bit of pot may not ruin their middle-class lives, but by smoking pot, they create an atmosphere of toleration that can be disastrous for others who are not so well-grounded. The Bill Bennett who can ooze disdain over this is the same Bill Bennett who apparently thinks he has no connection to all those "problem" gamblers because he makes millions preaching virtue and they don't.

3) He's doing no harm to himself. From the information in Alter's and Green's articles, Bennett seems to be in deep denial about this. If it's true that he's lost $8 million in gambling casinos over 10 years, that surely is addictive or compulsive behavior no matter how good virtue has been to him financially. He claims to have won more than he has lost, which is virtually (that word again!) impossible playing the machines as Bennett apparently does. If he's not in denial, then he's simply lying, which is a definite non-virtue. And he's spraying smarm like the worst kind of cornered politician—telling the Washington Post, for example, that his gambling habit started with "church bingo."

Even as an innocent hobby, playing the slots is about as far as you can get from the image Bennett paints of his notion of the Good Life. Surely even a high-roller can't "cycle through" $8 million so quickly that family, church, and community don't suffer. There are preachers who can preach an ideal they don't themselves meet and even use their own weaknesses as part of the lesson. Bill Bennett has not been such a preacher. He is smug, disdainful, intolerant. He gambled on bluster, and lost.



Michael Kinsley is Slate's founding editor.

[Gordon B]

DeLong offended one of his readers.

Brad - "Bill Bennett is a hypocrite, a loathsome fungus on the tree of American politics"

As a fan of mushrooms and mushroom culture, I take strong exception to this invidious comparison of fungi to Mr. Bennett.

Walt, I can't stand him, either.

[groover]

Originally Posted by Gordon B

DeLong offended one of his readers.

Brad - "Bill Bennett is a hypocrite, a loathsome fungus on the tree of American politics"

As a fan of mushrooms and mushroom culture, I take strong exception to this invidious comparison of fungi to Mr. Bennett.

Walt, I can't stand him, either.

Bennett's a pus-filled, oozing cyst on the rear of the American body politic. Anyone here eager to defend the integrity of pus-filled, oozing cysts?

Originally Posted by Gordon B

DeLong offended one of his readers.

Brad - "Bill Bennett is a hypocrite, a loathsome fungus on the tree of American politics"

As a fan of mushrooms and mushroom culture, I take strong exception to this invidious comparison of fungi to Mr. Bennett.

That's pretty funny.
You know, since I brought up laziness, this once again shows how lazy the media is. Rather than doing investigative stories on how policies and actions actually adversely affect African Americans, and thoughtfully examining if racism is implicit in those policies and actions, they just love to pounce on some stupid remarks made by a public person, and then self-righteously congratulate themselves on diving into the 'controversy.'

[Gentle Giant]

Think how much better off we'd be if Bennett's mother had aborted him.

[Gordon B]

Originally Posted by achilles

That's pretty funny.
You know, since I brought up laziness, this once again shows how lazy the media is. Rather than doing investigative stories on how policies and actions actually adversely affect African Americans, and thoughtfully examining if racism is implicit in those policies and actions, they just love to pounce on some stupid remarks made by a public person, and then self-righteously congratulate themselves on diving into the 'controversy.'

DeLong has a running theme that he invokes almost daily with examples, "Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?" His last entry along those lines, from Tuesday, was about four journalists who separately claimed that Bill Clinton bored them to tears by discussing PUBLIC POLICY with them. Here's his money quote,

Originally Posted by Brad DeLong

Kakutani, Kosova and Isikoff, and Crowley. Their complaints that an ex-president is interested in governance and issues--and is actually curious about places like Lesotho and Nigeria--are self-parody. "How dare an ex-president bore me!" they say. "I know nothing about global development or foreign affairs. How dare he find them interesting!"

[rollhead]

Originally Posted by groover

Bennett's a pus-filled, oozing cyst on the rear of the American body politic. Anyone here eager to defend the integrity of pus-filled, oozing cysts?

Well, pus is made up of macrophages and macrophages fight infection, while Bennett IS an infection. So, all things considered, I think pus is more easily defended than William Bennett.

Also -- while a few people have suggested that Bennett's words were taken out of context -- I think more than a few Republicans are closet eugenicists.

And Eugenics has a long history of support among Republicans

In fact, there was a Republican candidate for congress in Tennessee a few years ago who openly espoused eugenics.

Republicans loved the 1985 book "Crime and Human Nature," which arguing for a biological basis for criminality.

And in the early 20th Republican House Committee Chairman Albert Johnson appointed an "expert eugenics agent." In subsequent testimonies, the "expert" used flawed data to show that new immigrants had high levels of "all types of social inadequacy," including feeblemindedness, insanity, criminality, and dependency.

The Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, sponsored by Johnson, did everything eugenicists had hoped for. First, it limited total immigration to 165,000 -- about 15-20% of peak years. More important, it restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe countries to only 9% of the total. Northern and western European countries got 86% of the quota, even though they made up the minority of immigrants in 1923.

This change in the complexion of immigration was accomplished by a cunning use of statistics. The Johnson Act limited immigrants from each country according to their proportion in the U.S. population in 1890 -- a time prior to the major waves of southern and eastern European immigration when the U.S. was decidedly more Anglo-Nordic in composition.

[Gordon B]

Originally Posted by rollhead

Also -- while a few people have suggested that Bennett's words were taken out of context -- I think more than a few Republicans are closet eugenicists.

Well,

Originally Posted by Ronald Reagan

There you go again.

[Douglas]

Originally Posted by rollhead

Bennett's hypothetical proposal may have come out of a reading of the book "Freakonomics," by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner -- or more likely his reading of an article about it in American Conservative magazine;

http://www.amconmag.com/2005_05_09/feature.html

http://www.freakonomics.com/

Levitt, an economist, suggests that the force behind the recent fall in the national crime rate began when abortion was legalized in the 70s.

That is disputable.

What is pretty much accepted is the statistic that black women are more than 3 times as likely as white women to have an abortion, and Hispanic women are 2 1/2 times as likely.

The Levitt link was pretty obvious. You are slightly misleading in your description. IIRC, Levitt advanced 6 reasons for why crime has fallen recently, of which the abortion link was the most speculative. His agument was not supported by relative frequency, but by looking at the different timing that states legalised abortion and the different timing when crime rates started heading south.