Remember Bill Bennett? He was Reagan’s Secretary of Education, and has since made his living writing books and lecturing on morality and virtue, and recently on his radio show, Morning in America. Oh, and he also has a severe gambling jones, losing up to $8 million in one year in casinos, while simultaneously working as co-director for Empower America (which has been merged with Citizens For A Sound Economy to form Freedom Works), an organization which, among other things, lobbies to halt the spread of legalized gambling.

Anyway, Media Matters for America caught this interesting conversation with one of his callers on Wednesday’s Morning In America show (surf to their site and you can hear the clip for yourself):

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.

So it’s really fun listening to the right-wingers try and defend that. One rightie said

“He was discussing what was said in the book Freakanomics. The book claims a disproportionate number of poor are black and that crime is a result of poverty. Therefore it would be logical to conclude that aborting black babies would result in lowering the crime rate. He was answering a question in the abstract from a caller.”

Which, of course, is a distortion. Freakanomics notes that since abortion was legalized, crime rates have gone down, and extrapolates that is because young and poor women have most abortions, and those children would grow up in poverty, and children of poverty are more likely to grow up to commit crime. The book never brings race into the mix.

Once again, slowly: it’s not the blackness that causes crime, it’s the poverty. Are blacks more disproportionately poor? Yes. As a result, is there a disproportionate amount of crime committed by blacks? Yes. In a coldly statistical way his quote is absolutely accurate. Just like Jimmy the Greek’s “blacks are better athletes because slaveowners bred the big buck males with the strong healthy females” remark. Factual, but not tactful.

When you say “abort all the black babies”, you’re also lumping in the black babies of middle-class and affluent blacks. You’re attributing crime to blackness.

But beyond that, this has nothing to do with what context Bill Bennett was speaking in, it has to do with how that quote will be heard. I could make the same contextual argument for Jesse Jackson’s “Hymietown” remark, but that doesn’t change how people are going to react to that quote, either.

Jon Stewart played the clip on last night’s Daily Show. Other outlets have been replaying the clip. It doesn’t matter what the context is now; it was a boneheaded remark.

Here’s the reaction from Portland, via an email from my cousin Kenny (who is black). He works in a medical office alongside his Aunt Patti:

A funny thing happened when I got to work this morning. I was here for about 10 minutes or so, when all of a sudden, one of the guys I work with, an older guy about 62-63, came out from his office with his head hung down. Comes over to Patti and I and says, pretty loudly “I apologize on behalf of all good white people everywhere!” I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard, so early in the morning in my life, without somebody being injured! Anyhow, he heard the sound bite of William Bennett’s radio comment this morning and just cringed. Funny thing is, his whole life, until this last election, he’s been a Republican! (Especially) Now, he can’t stand them! GO REPUBLICANS! If they keep going at this rate, we’ll have our country back in no time at all!

So, please, go ahead and explain it away as “a response to a question in the abstract”. Here’s another abstract for ya: “We could just round up the neo-cons and the libertarians into an internment camp if you wanted to preserve civil rights. I mean, if that’s your sole purpose, you could just lock up all the extreme right-wingers and Evangelical Christians. It would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but you would preserve civil liberties.”