archy

More Bennett
Given further opportunities to apologize--this time ABC's Good Morning America--Bennett continues to say that he was just trying to make a point and his enemies are out to get him. I'd like to think that I'm included among his enemies, but I doubt as if he knows I exist (snif). Let's go to the tape:

Jake TAPPER: On Hannity & Colmes, Bennett said he was just making a hypothetical argument.

BENNETT (video clip): This is like Swift's "Modest Proposal," for people who remember their literature. You put things up in order to examine them. I put it up, examined it and said that is ridiculous and impossible, no matter who advances it.

TAPPER: But why immediately link blacks and crime? Bennett told me on the phone that race was on his mind because of recent stories in the media about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

BENNETT (audio clip): Stories about looting and shooting and gangs and roving gangs and so on. ... I'm sorry if people are hurt, I really am. But we can't say this is an area of American public policy that we're not allowed to talk about race and crime.

TAPPER: Robert George, a Republican editorial writer for the New York Post, agrees that Bennett's comments were not meant as racist but he worries they feed into stereotypes of Republicans as insensitive.

GEORGE: He should know better the impact of his words and sort of thinking these things through before he speaks.

TAPPER: In light of accusations that the Bush administration was not as sensitive to victims of Hurricane Katrina because many of them were black, one Republican official tells ABC News that Bennett's comments were probably as poorly timed as they were politically incorrect.

DIANE SAWYER: Well, Jake, I saw that you talked to him. What adjective did he use for what he said?

TAPPER: He didn't -- he said he was being provocative. He has a background in philosophy, and the idea was merely to put out a construct to discuss and shoot down. He did not seem particularly apologetic. He said he was sorry if anybody was hurt, but he saw this as a way that his enemies, his opponents were out to get him.

Let's leave it to Diane to explain to Tapper that "provocative" is an adjective.

If you go back and read the full context of Bennett's original comment, you will see that it was, just as he says, a straw man argument and not a serious suggestion.

My reasons for taking offense at Bennett's remarks were that they were eliminationist and insensitive and, that, in the context of the white fears of black criminality unleashed by the rumors following Katrina, dangerously inflammatory. Most of the stories that came out of New Orleans, about snipers shooting at rescue workers, about roving gangs of rapists, and about multiple murders at the Convention Center and Superdome, have turned out to be racist urban legends. The national news media (and right wing bloggers) eagerly spread these lies without making the slightest effort to confirm them. The myth of African-Americans as a "criminal race" never goes away. They disappear for a while, but at the first sign of urban unrest, the same lies are hauled out and recirculated to a shamefully credulous and easily scared white middle class.

I was willing to give Bennett some semblance of a benefit of the doubt in assuming that this vile statement was an off the cuff argument. I thought that it revealed something profoundly ugly about Bennett, but I was willing to allow that it was an unconscious prejudice and not a carefully thought out statement of his conscious beliefs. I was wrong.

Bennett, in his comments over the last day and a half, clearly says that this was not a spur of the moment thing. He says that it was a carefully thought out argument:

"I was putting forward a hypothetical proposition. Put that forward. Examined it. And then said about it that it's morally reprehensible. To recommend abortion of an entire group of people in order to lower your crime rate is morally reprehensible. But this is what happens when you argue that the ends can justify the means," he told CNN.

He also says that he specifically has New Orleans in mind:

TAPPER: But why immediately link blacks and crime? Bennett told me on the phone that race was on his mind because of recent stories in the media about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

BENNETT (audio clip): Stories about looting and shooting and gangs and roving gangs and so on. ... I'm sorry if people are hurt, I really am. But we can't say this is an area of American public policy that we're not allowed to talk about race and crime.

Bennett is admitting that he is not the same type of fool as Rush Limbaugh--an unthinking loud-mouth who can't figure out that flinging kerosene around a burning room might cause things to go boom. Bennett is saying that this was an intentional argument dropped into an inflammatory situation. He can't claim that the boom was unexpected. He meant to call African-Americans a criminal race.

The man is far more disgusting than I imagined.