Good News, Actually

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Good Afternoon. Yes, I’ve been away for a few days, and no, I’m not going to explain why. But I have not been so far removed from things that I have not caught the news, especially the running gag (or should I said bound-and-gagged, as in ‘fit to be tied’?) we call the MSM. I’m speaking, in particular, about the attempted twisting of Dr. Bennett’s comments last week about Abortion.

For those who somehow managed to miss it, the Daily Show put up a clip of Dr. William Bennett, noted conservative talk show host, responding to a caller with a scenario with this statement:

“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”

Well, that by itself certainly sounds horrible. And as expected, every knee-jerk, head-jerk, and other-jerk in general Liberal website and broadcast team started in to demand Bennett’s firing/lynching/deportation to outer Mongolia. But if you simply look at the very next thing Dr. Bennett said, you begin to wonder if the quote was yanked out of context:

“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.”

What happened was this – the caller was trying to claim that Abortion was responsible for lost revenue in the Social Security funds, and while that is statistically true, Dr. Bennett argued that this was a poor reason to argue against Abortion, to argue about finance and completely miss the moral imperative. To illustrate how ridiculous and offensive this example was, Dr. Bennett presented the argument in an equally statistical sense – there is significant evidence that not only are a disproportional number of criminal perpetrators in the United States black, but also a heavily disproportionate number of crime victims in the United States are also black. So Dr. Bennett’s example is exactly correct, especially when he reminded the caller that such a notion would be abhorrent on its face; you can not and must not separate the morality from the debate.

Taken in context, Dr. Bennett’s statement is not only clearly not racist, but an effective caution against forgetting the significance of a moral position. Small wonder that the Left ripped out the parts about morality; it’s increasingly hard to find a Liberal who thinks victims have equal rights to criminals, or that helpless infants enjoy the same rights as unwed female Kerry supporters. But it’s actually very good news, when you think about it.

Conservatives, while morally and (apparently) intellectually superior to Liberals, are still vulnerable to doing and saying incredibly stupid things. A smart Liberal would wait for just such a gaffe, test it out to make sure it’s what it looks like, then wreak havoc. After all, one clear lesson from the Presidency of George H.W. Bush is that Conservatives, even relatively mild ones, are held to a much higher standard than Liberals. However, another lesson the Liberals ought to have learned by now but somehow keep missing, is that folks have picked up on their bias (i.e. raving hatred) against Conservatives, and they tend to look for something to back up a claim. So, while Trent Lott mishandled his situation and it cost him a leadership slot, the lynchings of such notables as Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dubya himself all failed to happen, because the goods just weren’t there when people checked out the claim. The same thing happens in the case of Bennett; anyone who bothers to look finds out that basically, the good doctor never said what was claimed, but was actually presenting quite a different argument. In the end, this may annoy Dr. Bennett for a few days, but will inevitably just add to the mountain of evidence that the Liberals are unable and unwilling to defend their opinion with anything better than slander.

Slander monkeys, they just can’t learn.