Bill Bennett: Want To Lower The Crime Rate? Abort All African-American Babies

[GotZoom]

That's not what I was suggesting. What I'm suggesting is that the drug problem is the root for a lot of crime in the black community, but instead of treat drugs as a public health issue and educate, they are treated as a criminal issue.

I'm not sure your last sentence makes sense... the war on drugs isn't failing because it's always...been....failing?

That is because drugs are illegal.

Maybe if people in the black community would ....wild idea..I know....NOT GET INVOLVED IN DRUGS IN THE FIRST PLACE......

Will power, "just say no", parents teaching right from wrong...etc...

 

[The ClayTaurus]

That is because drugs are illegal.

Maybe if people in the black community would ....wild idea..I know....NOT GET INVOLVED IN DRUGS IN THE FIRST PLACE......

Will power, "just say no", parents teaching right from wrong...etc...

I see, so, since we've been handling this one way, and it continues to fail, let's not consider trying to improve it.

 

[ScreamingEagle]

Can anybody say "moron?" I saw the clip of this on the Daily Show yesterday.

Too bad you didn't see Bill Bennett's rebuttal on the Hannity & Colmes show last night.

The morons on the Left don't have a clue what Bennet was really saying. And, of course, as has already been pointed out, the media is leaving out the full context of the statement. Just more dirty politics.

 

[GotZoom]

I see, so, since we've been handling this one way, and it continues to fail, let's not consider trying to improve it.

Using your Slippery Slope theory.....

We can't seem to get rid of child molestation, rapes, and murder.

Perhaps education and counseling instead of incarceration would help decrease these things too.

We need more severe sentences for criminal acts - people need to know that punishment is punishment. Also, there needs to be more of a "treat them as criminals..as a pariah in society" instead of a glamourization of their acts or a ....poor guy, he was molested as a a child, he couldn't help it attitude.

My parents took away my car keys and grounded me for a month because I was 5 minutes late from a date one night. Severe? Yes..very.

But I was never late again.

 

[Mr. P]

...

I'm not sure your last sentence makes sense... the war on drugs isn't failing because it's always...been....failing?

Not what I said...What I said was...

And the war on drugs is not failing, since day one, it has been a failure.

In other words, the war on drugs never was a success, so it can't be failing. It simply failed from the start.

 

[The ClayTaurus]

Not what I said...What I said was...
In other words, the war on drugs never was a success, so it can't be failing. It simply failed from the start.

Ok, semantics

 

[Hagbard Celine]

"The war on drugs may be well intentioned
But it falls f**king flat when you stop and mention
The overcrowded prisons where a rapists gets paroled
To make room for a dude who has sold
A pound of weed to me that's a crime
Here's to good people doin time y'all!!!!" -311, Offbeat Bare Ass.

 

[Mr. P]

Ok, semantics

Not really..but we can end on that..unless you can show that the war on drugs ever really made any differance..at all. Then I'd admit it is failing.

 

[Mr. P]

"The war on drugs may be well intentioned
But it falls f**king flat when you stop and mention
The overcrowded prisons where a rapists gets paroled
To make room for a dude who has sold
A pound of weed to me that's a crime
Here's to good people doin time y'all!!!!" -311, Offbeat Bare Ass.

Back to class, DAWG!

 

[The ClayTaurus]

Not really..but we can end on that..unless you can show that the war on drugs ever really made any differance..at all. Then I'd admit it is failing.

No no, I meant semantics in the sense of the definition of the word failing. As in, you say something can't be failing if it never succeeded, whereas I think otherwise. Semantics. The war on drugs hasn't done squat, we agree.

 

[Nuc]

Two words.

Rap music.

One word.

Enron.

 

[no1tovote4]

One word.

Enron.

One more word...

Perjury

 

[GotZoom]

One word.

Enron.

What does Enron have to do with the Black Culture?

 

[Nuc]

What does Enron have to do with the Black Culture?

Because someone said black culture glorifies crime and used rap as an example. I just wanted to point out that white culture also glorifies crime.

 

[GotZoom]

Because someone said black culture glorifies crime and used rap as an example. I just wanted to point out that white culture also glorifies crime.

Former Enron CFO, Andrew Fastow, the mastermind behind Enron's complex network of offshore partnerships and questionable accounting practices, was indicted on November 1, 2002, by a federal grand jury in Houston on 78 counts including fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy. He and his wife Lea Fastow, former assistant treasurer, accepted a plea agreement on January 14, 2004. Andrew Fastow will serve a ten-year prison sentence and forfeit US$23.8 million, while Lea Fastow will serve a five-month prison sentence and a year of supervised release, including five months of house arrest; in return, both will provide testimony against other Enron corporate officers.

Ben Glisan Jr., a former Enron treasurer was the first man to be sent to prison in the Enron scandal. He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit security and wire fraud .

John Formey, a former energy trader who invented various strategies such as the "Death Star," was indicted in December 2002 on 11 counts of conspiracy and wire fraud. His trial was scheduled for October 12, 2004. His supervisors, Timothy Belden and Jeffrey Richter, both have pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit wire fraud and currently are aiding prosecutors in investigating this scandal.

Jeffrey Skilling was arrested on February 11, 2004, by the FBI. Kenneth Lay was indicted by a federal grand jury on July 7, 2004 for his involvement in the scandal. He pled not guilty in court on July 9. Both men are scheduled for trial in January 2006, along with Chief Accounting Officer Richard Causey.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron

----

Sounds like a glorious life to me.

Anyway...where exactly has Enron been glorified?

 

[Annie]

Links at site:

http://www.proteinwisdom.com/index.php/weblog/entry/19111/

Morning in (racist Rethuglican) America: an intentionalist perspective

On his “Morning in America” radio show a few days back, Bill Bennett—in the context of responding to a caller who’d suggested that making abortion illegal would create more workers 20 years hence—said:

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.

Predictably, the race baiters sprung immediately into action, and, instead of trying to understand Bennett’s point (which has nothing to do with anything inherent to blacks—and in fact, is an argument for just the opposite), decided instead to seize upon the remarks robbed of their context and intent to charge Bennett with racism and demand an apology. (For the record, Bennett was merely referencing “Freakonomics,” which posits the hypothesis that falling crimes rates are related to increased abortion rates decades ago—a position which I take it he rejects).

Sadly, prominent Democratic leaders, pundits and lawmakers have spearheaded this smear campaign, which I suspect they see as merely one more move in the give and take of the political game; because I refuse to believe that they actually believe Bennett is racist (although some likely do), and so are instead playing gotcha by putting him on the defensive to force him to defend remarks that they know had no racist intent. It’s as if because his words, taken out of context, can, to the uninformed, be taken to mean something they were never intended to mean, his words are therefore useful insofar as they can be deployed to cause him public discomfort—and, by extension, to taint the whole of the Republican party by association.

And the White House, increasingly incapable of taking a principled stand, provides these disingenuous race baiters with cover—presumably still reeling from the last round of disingenuous race baiting, which came in guise of Hurricane outrage.

None of this, given our partisan culture, is unexpected. But what gives these calculated and malicious rhetorical and performative ploys their political force is twofold: first, the willingness (in this case on the part of Democrats and the press, and now, the White House) to consider Bennett’s remarks outside of their argumentative context; and second, the idea that Bennett’s words are still his beyond his intent to use them in a certain way—which simply echoes the old Judith Butler axiom that “actions continue to act after
the intentional subject has announced its completion,” which, while true, is nevertheless incidental, and becomes dangerous as an assertion when interpretation is released from the ground of appealing back to the speaker’s intent. That is, what is at stake here is the role the subject plays in the “meaning” of the act vs. the role played by contingency in giving that act its (subsequent) meaning(s)—or, to put it more specifically, what William Bennett meant vs. what his words can be made to look like they might meanby those in whose interests it is to damage him. In short, they are taking ownership of his words, resignifying them, then using that resignification to taint Bennett with the charge of racism.

All of which takes us back, of course, to our discussions of Allah in the swirly cone, the Flight 93 Memorial, and Captain Ed’s use of “articulate.” Many of Bennett’s critics don’t particularly care what he meant. Instead, they care that what he said can be shown to mean something other than what he meant if it’s removed from context and resignified—though they will then turn around and argue that he really did mean his comments to carry a racist component (either consciously or unconsciously). Others will argue that, even if Bennett didn’t intend his argument to carry a racialist component (beyond using it as a hypothetical to make a moral point), he nevertheless should have known that some people would interpret his comments incorrectly, and so should have been more circumspect in making them.

The first argument is linguistically sound insofar as it ascribes to Bennett a particular intent; the second argument is linguistically corrupt, in that argues for some inherent meaning in the signifier—that the marks “mean” something beyond some intention to turn them into language by providing signification.

In this case, most of the criticism seems to me to be linguistically sound, though interpretively sloppy (and, in many cases, intentionally so). Because a fair, rigorous, and judicious reading of Bennett’s comments in their original context suggest he is arguing that, for any number of reasons—from a history of racial divisiveness to poverty to the crutch of the welfare state to failures in public education—blacks are, statistically-speaking, more likely to commit crime (in Bennett’s reading of crime statistics; others would argue that blacks are more likely to be targeted by law enforcement. But for our purposes, it is important that we understand Bennett’s premises). And from that premise, he suggests that, if a society wanted a pragmatic and morally untenable way to reduce crime, it could begin aborting those more statistically likely to commit crime. But doing so would be morally untenable precisely because the procedure would also eliminate a lot more people who wouldn’t, statistically speaking, fall prey to the criminal lifestyle; and so in order to correct a complex statistical issue in a way that is pragmatically expedient, society would be sanctioning something that is morally repugnant.

But why bring up race in the first place?

Well, as Bennett himself tells ABC News’ Jake Tapper:

"There was a lot of discussion about race and crime in New Orleans,” Bennett said. “There was discussion – a lot of it wrong – but nevertheless, media jumping on stories about looting and shooting and gangs and roving gangs and so on.

“There’s no question this is on our minds,” Bennett said. “What I do on our show is talk about things that people are thinking … we don’t hesitate to talk about things that are touchy.”

Bennett said, “I’m sorry if people are hurt, I really am. But we can’t say this is an area of American life (and) public policy that we’re not allowed to talk about – race and crime."

And Bennett is precisely right: fear of being branded a racist simply should not keep us from discussing racial issues—though that is precisely the practical effect in a culture where the levelling of such charges is easy and carries with it almost no consequences for the person doing the accusing, even if the accusation is made in bad faith, or is based on the flimsiest of pretenses.

Still, as it becomes more and more apparent that Bennett’s argument was manifestly not informed by racism, however, and that his critics’ intitial interpretations appealed to an intent on Bennett’s part that they incorrectly gauged —I expect they will begin shifting their condemnation toward the linguistically corrupt notion that the signifier, divorced from intent, is nevertheless the responsibility of the utterer. And indeed, such a procedure is already underway:

Robert George, an African-American, Republican editorial writer for the New York Post, agrees that Bennett’s comments were not meant as racist. But he worries they feed into stereotypes of Republicans as insensitive. “His overall point about not making broad sociological claims and so forth, that was a legitimate point,” George said. “But it seems to me someone with Bennett’s intelligence … should know better the impact of his words and sort of thinking these things through before he speaks."

Like “scratch” before him, George argues that, because other people could potentially misinterpret Bennett’s meaning, Bennett himself should have been more careful in choosing his words. And such an argument effectively gives the interpreter power over the grounds of interpretation and relativizes language.

But what would Robert George—and scratch, and all those who argue for the primacy of the signifier—say if I were to seize upon their linguistic position to argue that, for instance, a rape victim should have known better than to wear a low cut blouse, or that a Muslim who was accosted should have known better than to wander into an area heavily effected by the 911 attacks...?

****
update: To their credit, both Matt Yglesias and Brad Delong defend Bennett.

****
update 2: For those of you who wish to dismiss this kerfuffle as the consequence of a soundbite culture about which Bennett, as a political pro, needs to be more cognizant, let me remind you that the way we find ourselves in a soundbite culture to begin with is that we’ve traded context and original intent for brevity and the kind of resignification that comes when an editor decides what to show us is representative of an original utterance. Part of this is the nature of the media beast; which is why it is so important that we be able to trust those who are doing the initial interpreting for us.

****
update 3: John Cole has more. Be sure to read his comments, where you’ll find every conceivable justification for calling Bennett a racist, most of which boil down to, “because deep inside he probably is, being a Rethuglican and all.”

****
update 4: For a more thorough and thoughtful critique of Bennett (including a critique of my position), see David Schraub.

I think Schraub is wrong—for one thing, his argument proceeds from the idea that, because Bennett could have chosen other social groups besides blacks to make his same point (eg., aborting males or poor whites would likewise reduce crime), that he chose blacks bespeaks a tendency to reify certain unflattering associations between race and crime at the expense of pointing out just how unexceptional the association is; but it is contextually far more likely, at least from my reading of the argument, that he chose that particular example to heighten the moral hideousness of the premise, and history has taught us associate extermination with race or tribe rather than gender or social class. From a rhetorical standpoint, then, Jews would have carried the most associative weight, but that particular group doesn’t fit the remainder of the analogy’s terms.

Because Bennett’s argument is more to do with a type of statistics-based, morally reprehensible pragmatism than it is about race and criminality per se, the association that Schraub foregrounds is less important to Bennett than his desire to make the moral point most forcefully. Or, to put it more succinctly, Schraub says Bennett was racially insensitive; I say he was rhetorically forceful. And my argument is that Bennett intended his argument to be understood as such.

Posted by Jeff Goldstein @ 01:44 PM

 

[OCA]

I hear this is being reported with the part in red left out.
Anyone know if that's the case? I don't think it would be a surprise.

Still it was in incredibly stupid fucking thing to say in the first place, the damage has been done.

 

[Mr. P]

Still it was in incredibly stupid fucking thing to say in the first place, the damage has been done.

Well, taken in context it wasn't what the Media would like you to think.
I keep missing the entire statement, but I've picked up that he was referring to some book...Is that correct? I really am not sure.

 

[OCA]

Well, taken in context it wasn't what the Media would like you to think.
I keep missing the entire statement, but I've picked up that he was referring to some book...Is that correct? I really am not sure.

I don't know exactly, all I know is that even if he thinks that, in today's American political scene he should've kept his mouth shut. No matter how one trys to defend that statement its pretty clear its intent, even with the instantaneous backpedaling he did. His statement about it being a ridiculous thing was nothing more than an "oh shit! What the hell did I just say?"

 

[Annie]

I don't know exactly, all I know is that even if he thinks that, in today's American political scene he should've kept his mouth shut. No matter how one trys to defend that statement its pretty clear its intent, even with the instantaneous backpedaling he did. His statement about it being a ridiculous thing was nothing more than an "oh shit! What the hell did I just say?"

I disagree. Considering he is no longer in the formal political arena, rather a radio host and commentator, I think he has the right to join in a discussion that not only deals with social factors: race and poverty, but also the evils of abortion-which was his point.

BTW, it could easily be argued, it has been by many, that the left's support of abortion is causing them to lose elections and influence-they are killing their progeny.