The good ole days?

On the heels of the debacle that was Katrina, the latest headline to make me cringe had to be the one referring to the dialog between Bill Bennett and a caller on his radio show the other day. Bennett’s comment had been taken largely out of context but, that didn’t make it better. It’s the kind of statement that bought us the fun guys in the Nazi party of post WW1 Germany or maybe even that gregarious bunch that swears allegiance to the Grand Dragon.

The scary thing is, this is a former Secretary of Education speaking - like, you’d think this would be a smart person? If there is one small part of you that can even attempt to justify his statement, I suggest you swap out the word black in his comments and replace it with the name of your very own religious or ethnic group and see how well it sits.

Surprisingly enough, Bennett and his caller were citing Freakonomics, a book that is doing quite well recently. I haven’t read Freakonomics, so I can’t speak to the accuracy of their comments. I did however, read a snippet of the book as posted on Amazon which drew a correlation between the abortion rate and the decreasing crime rate. It’s a great thing when you can mask your own bs theories behind some kind of pseudo science. Not only that, it’s better still to get rich off of it.

I don’t know if I will actually plunk down money to buy Freakonomics but, I certainly want to read it. If only to see if there is any mention of our country’s increasing prison population as well as the declining US birth rate. Much as they may want to lay the decreasing crime rate at the door of Roe V Wade, I would like to think the issue is a bit more complicated than they would have you believe.

In the meantime, I have to say again one of the benefits of living in a free and open society is people have the ability to publicly put their foot in their mouth - I’m not agreeing with what their saying but they do have a right to say it.