Don't Bet on Bennett's Honesty

Bennett Blames Media, Should Blame Self

No one forced former Education Secretary William Bennett to make a racist comment on his Morning in America radio program. No one threatened to cause him harm if he refused to make such a sweeping statement condemning all African Americans. Bennett has no one to blame but himself.

On the September 28 broadcast of Bill Bennett's Morning in America, syndicated by Salem Radio Network to approximately 115 radio stations with an estimated weekly audience of 1.25 million listeners, this is what Bennett said:

CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about
the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social
Security, and I was curious, and I've read articles in recent months here,
that the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue
from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years,
could fund Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn't
-- never touches this at all.

BENNETT: Assuming they're all productive citizens?

CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it
would be an enormous amount of revenue.

BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don't know what the costs would be, too.
I think as -- abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No.

CALLER: I don't know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.

BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue for
the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it cuts
both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics
that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they
deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is
that abortion is up. Well --

CALLER: Well, I don't think that statistic is accurate.

BENNETT: Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either, because first
of all, there is just too much that you don't know. 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. 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.

Bennett is now trying to blame the media for the controversy surrounding his remarks, claiming news outlets distorted his remarks about aborting black babies.

In an Associated Press report Bennett claims: "I was putting forward a bad argument in order to put it down . . . they reported and emphasized only the abhorrent argument, not my shooting it down."

Bennett certainly has an odd way of "shooting" something down when he states "I do know that it's true."