* Tom DeLay, a man who just needs to keep hollering. He's truly at his best in the spotlight.
* The Vietnam War, now in its 41st year according to some.
* Calling out Bill Bennnett on his vast lack of sensitivity is now, libel? Could someone fax Dennis Prager a clue?
* Katrina, the Gathering. Collect them all.
* Next new catch phrase, "dirty protestors".
* Federal Wiretaps, possessing all the finesse and surgical precision of a depleted uranium bomb in Baghdad.
* If when surrounded by 'yes men', Bush was to ask, "Am I truly the worst president ever?", would they answer yes?
* Shot his wad. Spent his allowance. Squandered his capital. Pick a meme.
* Trustworthy, maybe. Miers though still didn't have the power to guarantee Bush read or comprehended all the information she provided.
Posted by kerry at October 4, 2005 03:33 AMoh the cards. delicious!
p.s. i just added 100monkeys to my personalized google homepage! weeeeee!
Posted by: lucy at October 4, 2005 06:17 AMI don't know if the left has actually characterized Bennett as a racist advocating abortion of black babies, or if the right has just falsely claimed that the left has. Strictly speaking, he did not actually advocate aborting black babies; he said it would be a horrible thing to do. He's not guilty of that. But what he is guilty of is just as bad.
On a purely facile, trivial level, his comments are accurate: some fraction of black people commit some fraction of the total crimes out there; if those people didn't exist, the crimes they commit wouldn't be committed.
But big effin' deal--the same statement would apply to any arbitrary subset of people--redheads, southpaws, people from Alabama, compulsive gamblers, conservative talk show hosts, Bush family offspring...if they had never existed, no crimes would have been committed by them, and crime rate would be lower.
The book he was discussing, Freakonomics, speculates that the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s correlates with an unexpected drop in the crime rate a generation later. Bennett took that observation and posited it as a means for achieving a desired goal. Now, to be clear, he did not advocate doing it as he's been accused of doing; in fact, he explicitly stated that it would be "impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible." But he nonetheless conceived the idea of doing it (suggesting that it's maybe not as "impossible" as he said).
Secondly, the book's argument was based on poverty, which crosses every racial and ethnic divide in the country. Bennett threw race into the equation where it hadn't existed before, and completely omitted mention of poverty or any other possible underlying cause. It went from "crime correlates with being raised in poverty" to "black people commit crimes."
Thirdly, he completely bypassed all the other possible ways of reducing crime and went straight to suggesting the systematic elimination of an entire group of actual people. This man served in government, making public policy decisions day in and day out, and when speculating on how to deal with an issue, the first thing that comes to his mind is, "well, we could--if solving the problem is your only concern--we could literally throw the baby out with the bathwater..."
It doesn't matter that he thought it was reprehensible; he still saw fit to throw it out into the realm of public discourse: the idea of genocide as a conceivable way of dealing with social problems. And that in and of itself is offensive enough.
Somewhere in between the right's vigorous defense and the left's apparent outrage, Bill has found himself much less popular than he was, pre-statement.
Posted by: kerry at October 4, 2005 08:44 AM