Posted on 10/05/2005 12:11:58 AM PDT by RadicalSon2
William Bennett's famous "The Book of Virtues" apparently doesn't include the virtue of shutting your yap when something stupid wants to come out.
Bennett went from Cabinet posts under Ronald Reagan and George Bush the elder to becoming Keeper of the Public Morals.
He pontificates endlessly in print and on radio about the importance of character, virtue and morality -- in other people. His own character failed him last Wednesday on his radio show when he said America's crime rate would go down if every black baby was aborted.
Whoa! Paging Dr. Mengele ...
Just a minute. Bennett says his words were taken out of context.
Even though he said the crime rate would go down, he added that aborting every black baby in the country would be "impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible."
So he's no racist. He opposes the forced, wholesale abortion of black fetuses. A regular Martin Luther King Jr., this guy.
Of course, he still equates being black with being a criminal.
There are a lot of black criminals. No question about it. About 10.4 percent of the African-American male population ages 25 to 29 is behind bars. Only 1.2 percent of white men in that age group are in prison.
There are more African-American men in jail than in college. In 2000, there were 791,600 black men in prison and 603,032 enrolled in college.
A racist looks at these statistics and sees black people as outlaws. However, there are other statistics to consider.
According to the 2002 census, 8.0 percent of white people lived in poverty, compared with 21.4 percent of black people. When you look at crime through the prism of poverty instead of race, poor whites fare no better in the prison statistics than poor blacks.
Bennett was responding to a book that argued crime goes down as abortions to up.
But Bennett didn't refute that argument. He merely made a fool of himself by adding race to the equation.
He might have said a better way to fight crime is to focus on reducing poverty, educational disadvantages and disease.
The problem isn't race. It's class.
Bennett fails to understand that, and that's why he deserves the wrath he's receiving. -- T.H.
thenderson@lmtribune.com
To the left, every single problem in the universe relates back to 'class'. Paging Karl Marx!
All the info on the show in question is available to any writer. No prob. Note how many prefer Journalistic Whoredom, to plain fact and truth. The item about aborts. of blacks vs. future crime rates came up on E.I.B 2-3 yeras ago, now. Meanwhile, back a the farm, it is still mostly blacks that are the victims in black crimes.
[...when he said America's crime rate would go down if every black baby was aborted. ... Bennett says his words were taken out of context. ... Even though he said the crime rate would go down, he added that aborting every black baby in the country would be "impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible."]
[There are a lot of black criminals. No question about it. About 10.4 percent of the African-American male population ages 25 to 29 is behind bars. Only 1.2 percent of white men in that age group are in prison. There are more African-American men in jail than in college. In 2000, there were 791,600 black men in prison and 603,032 enrolled in college.]
It sounds like the author, Tom Henderson, is saying something similar to William Bennett, whether he knows it or not.
It's too bad so many people get sidetracked by emotion when they hear statements like this about "race", and thereby render themselves incapable of logical thought on the issue.
[The problem isn't race. It's class. Bennett fails to understand that.]
The author fails to understand that Bennett clearly does understand it's not about race. Tom Henderson missed this because his brain switched off when he heard "black" and "crime" in the same sentence.
Okay, so NINE times more blacks are incarcerated than whites, yet
"...there are other statistics to consider.
....8.0 percent of white people lived in poverty, compared with 21.4 percent of black people."
a little over a third more whites than blacks are in poverty, but blacks are responsible for NINE TIMES MORE CRIME?
Whoever looks at those numbers isn't a racist, but a realist.
What causes poverty in many families and communities? Poor choices, lack of motivation, bad behavior. (of course this only accounts for most of it)
Education begins at home, if you want your children to succeed, teach them discipline, hard work, responsibility, appreciation for the country and the freedoms we have--but instead I hear much the opposite from the Jesse Jackson gangsters.
Disease?; What kind of disease? Do you mean disease like genetic and non-preventable or do you mean disease as in STDs, drug abuse induced, alcohol abuse connected, sexual abuse connected, choice related and things that are preventable.
We need to help people, but this is not a nanny state. We can't blame disease on others most of the time.
I wonder why no one focuses on what is probably the biggest problem---the enormous irresponsibility seen on display in many black communnities which lead to out-of-wedlock births, fatherless children, horrible lifestyle examples which in this PC country are praised as -diversity or cultural behavior- , when in fact it is destructive behavior and lead to terrible lives and in many cases, to crime.
Most who are in prison have made very poor choices and have very long track records of irresponsibility.
Is this whiner trying to say that most blacks that are in prison are actually innocent? I doubt that very much, maybe a few.
Someone like George Washington Carver is a good role model for blacks, but rebellious radicals and two-bit halfwit entertainers are praised instead.
According to the 2002 census, 8.0 percent of white people lived in poverty, compared with 21.4 percent of black people. When you look at crime through the prism of poverty instead of race, poor whites fare no better in the prison statistics than poor blacks.
So are they criminal because of their poverty; or are they impoverished becasue they are criminals?
It is very hard to get ahead in this old world if you spend most of your time and resources scheming your next job, paying for your last job, or hiding out from your current job, but never get around to GETTING A JOB.
I never understood the economic sense of spending an hour "planning" how to rob Apu at the Kwikee Mart; having your hands on $50 for a couple of hours, then spending several days in jail & court.
Work is easier, and pays so much better.
Bennett's inability to forsee that his comments would not be taken merely as an intellectual exercise, combined with his gambling problem, perhaps indicate that he is undergoing some sort of mental degeneration.
I don't know if its entirely ranting. He makes a decent point. The problem is the author makes a logical fallacy in drawing the conclusion that Bennet equates crime with race rather than poverty. Bennet never cited a root cause, because he didn't need to in order to make his point. The statistics backing Bennet's point are an absolute, regardless of why. Unfortunately, the example he used was not politically astute for a white Republican to choose.
Hey, Bennett was RESPONDING to a book called Freakanomics that made this claim. He was saying how ABSURD the book's point was, about abortion and the black community. God how I hate the press....
Nobody ever wants to talk about the fact that the FBI stats on race of the perps is taken from victims as part of the incident report. It has nothing to do with arrest or conviction rates.
The significant majority of black perps are reported as such by black victims. If blacks are not really committing crimes at a much higher rate, one of two things is going on. Either these black victims are lying about being victims, or they are reporting their attackers as being black when they were really of another race.
If you crunch the FBI's numbers, you find that crimes committed by whites are about 20% more likely to result in conviction than crimes committed by blacks. Rather than blacks being more likely to go to jail for a particular crime than whites, they are actually less likely to be convicted and imprisoned.
The author is correct insofar as his statements that crime is a function of class, not race. However, poverty doesn't cause crime. Rather, the same irresponsibility and poor choices that statistically make people poor in this country also are likely to cause people to engage in criminal behavior.
The book talked about crime rates and abortion. The author was wise enough not to analyze how race factored into the equation.
What Bennett said is of course obvious to anyone with half a brain. If all blacks disappeared tomorrow, many of our social pathologies, with which blacks are very disproportionately associated, would be greatly reduced. Statistically, that is just an irrefutable fact.
Of course, you could say the same about gender. Get rid of all men, and the crime rate, especially the violent crime rate, would go way down.
But making such points about race is just one of those things we're not allowed to say in our society, probably because they are true and we don't like to admit it.
In the first place, no one should be criticized for speaking the truth. The crime statistics clearly indicate that blacks are convicted of crimes in numbers far greater than their proportion of the population. What part of the truth can't the writer understand?
In the second place, Bennett said, in the next sentence, that to do so would be morally repugnant. It's the character of the writer that's on display here, a character who has no regard for the truth.
No, I don't believe they are. In fact having thought about all this ranting, and I think that in fact the LRMSM, is trying very hard to cover their own arses by making such a big deal of this.
Recall this comment came on the heels of the revelation of just how wrong the LRMSM got the Katrina coverage. The real story was how well the poor people in NO behaved in the face of enourmous hardship, brought to them courtesy of nature and their abysmal leadership. But somehow the press got all the stories about mayhem, criminality and societal breakdown all wrong, based upon rumors they were only too glad to spread.
They had to find a scapegoat and quick for their own revealed racism, and old Bill certainly, stepped in it. But it did take the spot light off of the lefty press, and the underlying attitudes about crime and sociopathology that skated very close to the vilest racial slurs, that they want to pin on Bennett. They couldn't afford to let this pass. Of course they wouldn't have at any time, but this particular time was quite fortuitous for them. IMHO
No. Henderson is talking about an observed fact in the present. Bennett is operating under the assumption that either black people are inherently criminal or that the conditions that black Americans face as a whole will not change at all in the next generation.
It's likely that Bennett assumes the second rather than the first, but in either case his vision of the future is still one in which African Americans are necessarily more likely to commit crimes.
That was his mistake. His refusal to acknowledge such is reprehensible.
Read the article again. The first set of numbers refers to males aged 25 to 29. The second set refers to the general population.
Whoever looks at those numbers isn't a racist, but a realist.
Whoever thinks he is a realist based on that data is simply bad a statistics.
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