tellhimfred.com

Former education secretary and director of drug control policy Bill Bennett is causing some serious controversy. On his radio show “Morning in America,” he said the following:

“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,”

The statement was in response to a new book, Freakonomics, which says that one reason crime is down is that abortion is up.

It’s gotten so much press that the president even had to make a statement through his spokesman, Scott McCLellan:

“The president believes the comments were not appropriate”

We’ll have to see what comes of this.

To be perfectly honest, it is a true statement. If you aborted every white baby, this also works. The notion is simple: if you get rid of an entire population, crime will decrease. So on a purely numerical scale, it makes sense. Just think of it in pure economic terms: if you killed off, say, 100 million Americans at random, crime would decrease (other than, of course, the act of killing 100 million people in itself!)

But that doesn’t matter whatsoever. The buzz and criticism is due to his implication. The statement in itself implies that it is blacks that cause crime, so if you got rid of blacks, crime would then dramatically decrease. Again, it’s in between the lines. Taken as just a statement without implication, there’s nothing wrong there. But the choice of words means everything.

He said “black baby.” That means something. It means a lot.