Get Bennett Gambling Again!

Well, if the fancy lads at Slate think it's tough to talk about race and hiring policies at the nation's most prestigious newspapers, they ought to step into the shoes of professional outrageur and self-crowned "values czar" (tsar?) Bill Bennett.

The Book of Virtues * author has started a flap by yapping on his "Morning in America" radio show thusly:

"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."

More on that here.

Bennett, who says he was extrapolating from an argument in the bestselling book Freakonomics, tells ABC News:

"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."

For interesting rebuttals to Freakonomics' contention that more abortions mean fewer crimes, go here and here.

In the ABC News story, written by Jake Tapper, NY Postman, occasional Reasonite, and black Republican Robert A. George says that he doesn't think Bennett meant the comments to be racist but he agrees that such comments play into the stereotype that the GOP really doesn't like blacks: "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." Which certainly sounds about right.

George expands on the issue at his Ragged Thots blog here.

* Update: fixed mispelling of Bennett's big book.

More update: Brad DeLong makes a defense of 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.

Whole thing here.