Freak O Bennett

Reading a book on McCarthyism and having the Bill Bennett deal come up while reading it is almost too weird. Last week on his radio show, in the process of REJECTING an argument that abortion is economically to blame for there not being enough young around the pay the social security bills of the old, Bill Bennett said:

“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. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.”

It turns out that he later credited the discussion to the book “Freakonomics” by Steven D Levitt (Economist) covered in this Blog under “The Criminal Roe Effect”. Levitt is an economist and points out that since abortion disproportionately takes the lives of black, single parent, and poor children, and those groups have higher crime rates, abortion reduces the crime rate. The book was published earlier this year and is a NYT best seller … not a complaint has been heard about IT or it’s authors as being “racists”.

The comments from Bennett of course immediately elicited the charge of “racist” and the expected set of calls for his radio program to be removed from the airwaves by the FCC, including from Harry Reid and John Conyers.

The closest name we have for this “McCarthyism of the left” is “Political Correctness”, but that is a term that is far from chilling enough. “Racism” and “Sexism” are used as one way bludgeons by the MSM and Democrats to enforce their own form of thought control whenever the opportunity arises. Robert Byrd gets a pass but Bill Bennett is jumped on and every attempt is made to silence his speech entirely. Haynes Johnson recoils in horror when CONSUMERS decide to boycott the Dixie Chicks after their claim on foreign soil that they were “embarrassed that the President was from Texas”, but elected Congressmen trying to take Bill Bennett off the radio for making a comment that is technically irrefutable and previously published in a best selling book is completely acceptable.

Clarence Thomas is submitted to a high tech lynching over a 10 year old claim that he MENTIONED an X rated movie and a potential pubic hair on a can of Coke. NOW and all other women’s organizations remain completely silent when Bill Clinton is accused of dropping his pants in front of a female employee.

What the left wants, and has had for most of the past 50 years is “one-way McCarthyism”. They define the term, and make the term to mean “from the right”, and never acknowledge that they do the exact same thing only using a much wider set of levers than just “Communism”. They carry it out with a broad set of groups from the NAACP, NAARL, NOW, Sierra Club, ACLU as well as the MoveOn.orgs and others. Those that fail to follow the proscribed “correct thinking and speech” are subjected to any means of censure possible by the powers of the left. They hated McCarthy because he provided them a taste of their own medicine. They continue to hate all else but the bleating of their own voices in unison.