JONATHAN NOT SO SWIFT

BILL BENNETT HAS WON this year’s Jonathan Not So Swift Award.  [story] Each year a prize is awarded to the public figure who with a dubious public utterance most ill approaches the style of satirist Jonathan Swift.  Those who recall a time before Paris Hilton rocked the world even more than the Paris Commune may recall Swift had an immodest  solution for the “Irish Problem” back in the early Eighteenth century.  Too many Irish children among those breed ‘em can’t feed ‘em Catholic Irish? Export the wee ones then, or better yet eat them.

BENNETT NOW SWALLOWS some criticism for his like and kindly suggestion that if you aborted all black babies, the crime rate would go down.  The people who don’t understand this obvious satire can’t take a joke. Or they can’t take Bill Bennett. Or both.

RECOMMENDED READING
[Majikthise] There's nothing offensive about a little reductio amongst friends.

THE HERETIK IS UNCERTAIN whether Bennett’s mistake is in his concept or in his execution.  And speaking of execution, public execution of people who abuse free speech privilege with stupid speech would leave more vowels and consonants around for the rest of us to use in a wise way.  Executing Bennett would be a helpful reductio ad infinitum.

ROLE REVERSAL AND ALL THAT [Jesse Taylor/Pandagon] All I'm going to say to idiots like Andrew McCarthy is that if Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton made the (completely true) point that we would likely never have another serial killer if we just aborted all white male babies, they'd be ready to burn the DNC down.

SHAMEFUL ATTACKS [ANDREW C. McCARTHY/NRO] Bennett is being fried by the PC police and the ethnic-grievance industry, which have disingenuously ripped his minor point out of its context in a shameful effort to paint him as a racist. He’s about as bigoted as Santa Claus.

THE HERETIK NOTES out of context is usual the attack defense used by someone who later realizes when he said something, he might have been um out of his mind.  Mister Bennett, your psychiatrist called and said you can pick up your meds in Vegas.  And as far as Santa Claus goes, he needs to get with this PC affirmative action thing. Black elves are entirely underrepresented.

SO WHY SHOULD I CARE?
[Running Scared] Now, as expected, some groups missed the point completely, and harked at him for "insensitive, hurtful and ignorant rhetoric". And reading through the CNN article, you get the impression he made that statement out of the blue, completely reversing the meaning. Usually I'm not into the "liberal media" conspiracy talk, but this makes me wonder who's trying to get an agenda across in this kind of reporting.

LIBRULS [Avedon Carol] Mysteriously, some liberal bloggers just don't seem to be able to find much outrage over Bennett's outrageously racist remarks. Kudos to Garance Franke-Ruta for being prepared to question that reaction even when it comes from a colleague with whom she shares real estate on Tapped's page

ALL THE HERETIK IS GOING TO SAY is he is looking forward to Bill Bennett’s Final Solution for those damned liberals.

ALSO HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
THIS 'MORALS' THINGS ISN'T WHAT IT'S CRACKERED UP TO BE! [Pessimist/The Left Coaster] I'm surprised (no, not really!) that this story isn't getting more coverage, for it exposes the basic hypocrisy that is the main motivator of the Republican Party.

THE HERETIK REALLY LIKES The Pessimist’s way with words. The Pessimist doesn’t  like the Republicans’ ways with race relations.

[Digby] And, by the way, Bennett's crime is that he essentially said "blacks are born criminals."  Certainly, you can say that aborting any number of discrete demographic groups could have an effect on the crime rate, but attributing it to race suggests something immutable.

THE BENNETT SLIP [Echidne] If he had really wanted to make the point by picking a group with very high crime rates he should have suggested aborting all male fetuses.

[Agitprop] As Bennett himself said: "If we are surrounded by the trivial and the vicious, it is all too easy to make our peace with it." Surrounded by the vicious? If Bill retires, it'll be less of a crowd.

[Tattered Coat] Bennett’s statement, which he now says was hypothetical (or, to use his own language, “a thought experiment about public policy”), is so clear, and so forthright, that it needs no parsing. 

That, at least, is what I thought when I first read it.  But I see that my new friends on The Corner would disagree with me — Jonah Goldberg calls this “a silly, manufactured, attack on Bennett. Maybe he could have phrased it differently, but the point he made is rational . . .”

Of course, the rationality of the point depends on what your definition of “rational” is. Personally, I don’t think that conducting involuntary mass abortions on the basis of race is a very rational solution to the problem of crime in this country, but what do I know — I’m just one of those kooky bloggers, not a former U.S. Secretary of Education with a nationally syndicated radio show and a “philosophy professor’s hat.”

At any rate, though the import of Bennett’s words are clear to most of us, the spin he uncorked after a controversy broke out is a little bit harder to follow.

Comments

[zencomix]

I wish I could draw fast enough to keep up with it all!

[Mustang Bobby]

Great minds think alike.

[Kate S.]

I am .............. speechless, without utterance, exclamation, or ... oh dear, what have I done with my mind? I know it's around here somewhere. I know it must be, because I used it yesterday. But this newest statement issued to shock and awe and rally "those people" makes me think I must have the wrong brain because the words do not compute, the words people are using to express their deepest opinions on the colors of the world and how if they were God they would have a different pallette with which to paint the world ... just do not compute.

Is Bennet perhaps innocently channeling Jim Crow? Does he have a closet hidden with klan artifacts?
Is the world collectively losing its fucking mind?

I hope the world has a long memory, so it will remember these people ... and their words. We should keep them segregated from society till they learn how to play nice with others.

[Ron Brynaert]

We could probably reduce teenage alcoholism if we aborted all Bush babies....ooooh that shit is cold..

[Neil Shakespeare]

How about aborting all white girl babies? Then, 20 years from now, we wouldn't have all those missing white women that plague our TV reporters so, and the crime rate in Aruba would drop to zero.

[Elayne Riggs]

Oh good, I'm not the only one who immediately thought of A Modest Proposal when hearing Bennett's words. Too bad the current administration doesn't get stuff like satire...