Subject:
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Re: Bennett IS unworthy of being used as toilet paper
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 7 Oct 2005 14:37:03 GMT
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Viewed:
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1313 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Bruce Schlickbernd wrote:
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, John Neal wrote:
s to say it.
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They won’t say it because it is patently absurd, just as Bennett was arguing
reductio ad absurdum.
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I doubt it. He chose a racist example to make his point.
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Come on! You seriously can’t think that Bennett had any inkling that this
action was anything but rhetorical fodder! Your biased against Bennett the
person is clouding your judgment.
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He didn’t he have an inkling? Okay, he is an idiot then. Racist, idiot: I
don’t see why you would bother to defend either.
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Because he is neither the idiot nor the racist he’s painted to be.
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I’m biased against Bennett? That’s an amusing claim: I honestly don’t even
know who the heck he is, or if he is a Republican or Democrat, or even if he
is an American.
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Fair enough.
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You, on the other hand, seem to be biased in his favor and
it is definitely clouding your judgment. Say what you want to about the
Guardian, but defending Bennett to get at the Guardian seems pretty biased to
me.
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Well, yes, because I know of him and know his politics, and so I know that the
charges against him are baseless.
As far as “defending Bennett to get at the Guardian”; well, that’s backwards. I
am attacking the Guardian because of its irresponsibility in this non-story
story about Bennett.
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3. You aren’t making a racially
based insinuation that blacks are the source of crime.
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But they are a source of crime! And disproportionately so. Not the
source of crime, but Bennett doesn’t assert this anyway.
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And whites are a source of crime, and they commit more crimes than blacks do
in America, but is his example about aborting all white babies? If the guy
wasn’t a racist (closet or otherwise) he would have made reference to
economic background rather than race. He’d rather get in a little
fear-mongering.
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Okay, I just came across a piece by Richard Cohen, with whom I agree on this
matter. Since the Post requires subscribing, I’ll c&p the salient paragraphs,
because I think he defends Bennett better than I:
Responding to a caller who argued that if abortion were outlawed the Social
Security trust fund would benefit -- more people, more contributions, was the
apparent (idiotic) reasoning -- Bennett said, sure, he understood what the
fellow was saying. It was similar to the theory that the low crime rate of
recent years was the consequence of high abortion rates: the fewer African
American males born, the fewer crimes committed. (Young black males commit a
disproportionate share of crime.) This theory has been around for some time.
Bennett was not referring to anything new.
But he did add something very important: If implemented, the idea would be “an
impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do.”
He should have saved his breath. Prominent Democrats -- Harry Reid in the
Senate, John Conyers and Rahm Emanuel in the House and, of course, Pelosi --
jumped all over him. Conyers wanted Bennett suspended from his radio show.
Emanuel said Bennett’s comments “reflect a spirit of hate and division.” Pelosi
said Bennett was out of the mainstream, and Reid simply asked for an apology.
Actually, it is Reid and the others who should apologize to Bennett. They were
condemning and attempting to silence a public intellectual for a reference to a
theory. It was not a proposal and not a recommendation -- nothing more than a
possible explanation. But the Democrats preferred to pander to an audience that
either had heard Bennett’s remarks out of context, or merely thought that any
time conservatives talk about race, they are being racist. The Democrats’
obligation as politicians, as public officials, to see that we all hear the
widest and richest diversity of views was suspended in favor of partisan cheap
shots. (The spineless White House also refused to defend Bennett.) Because I
came of age in the McCarthy era, I have always thought of the Democratic Party
as more protective of free speech and unpopular thought than the Republican
Party. The GOP was the party of Joe McCarthy, William Jenner and other
witch-hunters. Now, though, it is the Democrats who use the pieties of race,
ethnicity and gender to stifle debate and smother thought, pretty much what
anti-intellectual intellectuals did to Larry Summers, the president of Harvard
University, when he had the effrontery to ask some unorthodox questions about
gender and mathematical aptitude. He was quickly instructed on how to think.
He defends Bennett in the context of taking the Democrats out to the woodshed,
but whatever. <shrug>
JOHN
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