Democracy for California

Prosecutor Should Dig Deeper

by Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith

Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald's investigation into the leak of a CIA operative's name has reaffirmed the basic American principle that even the highest government officials are subject to the rule of law. His charges represent the start of a revitalization of the institutions designed to maintain government under law. But that revitalization still has a long way to go.

As a prosecutor, Mr. Fitzgerald rightly brought charges where the law was clearest and the evidence most compelling. But the alleged crimes he is investigating are in essence the apparent cover-up operation for another possible set of crimes against national and international law. Why would I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby commit perjury and lie to FBI agents, as he is accused of doing?

The letters from Acting Attorney General James B. Comey appointing Mr. Fitzgerald delegated to him "all the authority of the attorney general" to investigate and prosecute "violations of any federal criminal laws related to the underlying alleged unauthorized disclosure."

We would argue that Mr. Comey's charge, based on the evidence Mr. Fitzgerald has uncovered, authorizes the special prosecutor to investigate the following...

Rosa, Rosa, Rosa

by
Ernie McCray

Forever etched in my mind and soul is an image of Rosa Parks sitting softly, as she had in that historic picture of her looking out of a bus window, with a white man sitting behind her with a kind of “going with the flow” expression on his face. In this particular vision, as she sits, she is radiating her warm smile my way as I and a few children from a school where I was the principal, on one occasion, and my twin daughters and youngest son, on another occasion, sang to her.

“Rosa, Rosa, Rosa,” we serenaded. “Rose up from the crowd.” I had shared with all the children how her simple act of defiance affected so many people so the next words were: “Rosa, Rosa, Rosa made us feel, oh so proud. Got us up on our feet. Yes, oh yes, she did. Got our souls to humming and our hearts to beat. Oh, yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.”

I recalled for the children my first bus trip in the 40’s with my mother somewhere below the Mason and Dixon Line. I told them how I, without knowing what I was doing, since I was only about 4 or 5, wandered up to the front of the bus, breaching the color line, and the chaw chewing bus driver, startled beyond belief hit the brakes and spun the bus, seemingly, across a couple of county lines which must have scared cattle of everykind from miles around. And he told my mother to sit her monkey down - and, the sad thing was: I hadn’t seen anything yet as I found out over time.

With that in mind we sang: “Rosa, Rosa, Rosa stood in the face of hate. Rosa, Rosa, Rosa let civil rights right through the gate. Gave us something we can’t have too much of. Yes, oh yes, she did. Dignity and a spirit bathed in love. Oh, yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.”

I appreciated that the children comprehended at a deep level how I couldn’t understand, at any level in my being why, back then, I couldn’t enjoy life’s simple pleasures, why I couldn’t, like white folks, sit down and feed my face - or drink from any water fountain - or sit anywhere at the picture show - or skate at the rink on any day - or swim in all the pools - or sit at the front of the bus and do what little boys like to do: watch bugs smash against the windshield and go: “Yuck!” But all that was asking too much.

You could hear, in our voices, the celebration of the passing of those hateful days when we sang a phrase of praise to Rosa’s taking us “to another place,” putting a “smile on our frowning face,” giving us “a hint of what it’s like to be free,” and “straightening our spines in Montgomery.” Our voices rang about how when Rosa didn’t give up “that old bus seat, she swept Jim Crow right off his feet. Oh, yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.”

All the while, as we sang, Rosa sat softly in her gentle manner, and her magnificently beautiful smile never left her face. That image is a most cherished memory and will forever sustain me as I pursue keeping her legacy alive. Not too long ago Sister Rosa asked us to dedicate our lives to what she dedicated her life to: “...peace, justice, equality, and love and fulfillment of what our lives should be.”

Just think: what a world this could be if we all honored Rosa’s wonderful legacy, understanding that this is the way it has to be if human beings are to survive the 21st Century.

Staying The Course

by Doran

October 26, 2005 marked two-thousand American military deaths in Iraq. I hear, however from the positive spinners...

• 20% of Baghdad has been made peaceful
• Iraqi employment is up, from 50% just after we attacked, to 66%
• the best way to honor the dead is to keep fighting

Well, I must ask, if it takes two thousand US soldiers dying to make 20% of Baghdad peaceful, how many US soldiers must die to make Baghdad 100% peaceful? Would ten-thousand US deaths be sufficient?

Are US soldiers dying so Iraqis have more jobs? What the hell?

Honoring the dead by persisting in Iraq is a lemming rationale. One honors the dead not by following them off a cliff but by stopping the idiocy that continues to take human lives.

The worst spin insists that two thousand is a false mark, that the first death is just as significant as the last death. That's true. NO American soldiers should have died to defend against Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Not one single death in Iraq is justifiable.

If this administration is truly proposing the number of deaths is insignificant, but that every individual death IS significant, then let's change the news. Let's talk about every death - see the coffin lowered into the ground, share the tears of every mother and father, the sorrow of every sibling and friend, and ask the question every time, "How and why did this soldier die?" - and NOT let any US soldier's death be treated as insignificant or made invisible by this administration.

Of course, that's not what this administration proposes. It proposes everyone remain pleasantly ignorant, in as much denial is possible. Let those who truly question waste their time and energy seething among themselves and asking for thoughtful discussion - again among themselves - and stay effectively displaced from bought and paid media as it unloads the next pile of crap on the public.

Great.

The Dreaded Milestone

2000

DEAD

One was too many.

ROSA PARKS, 1913-2005

Rosa Parks, the Alabama seamstress whose simple act of defiance on a segregated Montgomery bus in 1955 stirred the nonviolent protests of the modern civil rights movement and catapulted an unknown minister named Martin Luther King Jr. to international prominence, died Monday of natural causes at her Detroit home. She was 92.

Often called the mother of the movement that led to the dismantling of institutionalized segregation in the South, Parks became a symbol of human dignity when she was jailed for refusing to relinquish her bus seat to a white person when she was riding home from work on the evening of Dec. 1, 1955.

Her arrest for violating Alabama's bus segregation laws galvanized Montgomery's blacks, who boycotted the city's buses for 381 days until the U.S. Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional. (LA Times)

In a time marked by mendacious leaders, rapacious corporations and a racist war of conquest in Iraq, let's pause to remember Parks, whose individual act of courage 50 years ago started Americans of all colors on the road to redemption from the evils of Jim Crow.

Thank you, Ms. Parks. Rest in peace.

Chalabi to Visit Washington

The mind boggles.

Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader accused of giving the Bush administration flawed information about Saddam Hussein's weapons program, will visit Washington in November amid speculation that U.S. officials view him as an acceptable candidate for Iraqi prime minister . . .

Time quoted unnamed administration officials as saying Rice and Hadley both view Chalabi as "a plausible and acceptable" candidate for prime minister in the next round of Iraqi elections due December 15.

The longtime Iraqi exile began attracting U.S. attention as a potential prime minister after Washington decided Iraq's current premier, Ibrahim Jaafari, had discredited himself by seeking overly friendly relations with Iran.

U.S. officials saw Chalabi as a possible postwar leader of Iraq before the 2003 invasion, when Chalabi was the best-connected Iraqi politician in Washington.

His Iraqi National Congress directed defectors to the U.S. government with intelligence on Iraq's weapons program that critics now say was largely crafted to prod the United States into taking action against Saddam.

The Pentagon, one of Chalabi's main prewar supporters, paid the INC $340,000 a month for intelligence on Iraq.

Chalabi had a falling out with his U.S. backers after no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. U.S. troops raided his home in early 2004.

But a presidential commission in March quoted the CIA as saying the Chalabi group had little influence on assertions that President George W. Bush used to justify the invasion.

A U.S.-educated mathematician and businessman, Chalabi was also a source on prewar Iraq for New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who is now at the center of an investigation into the leaking of a CIA operative's identity.

Via Billmon

How much longer can we endure these scoundrels?

The Human Cost of A Lie

Cindy Sheehan plans to tie herself to the White House fence in protest of a war that has cost nearly 2,000 American lives and countless thousands of innocent Iraqis.

"I'm going to go to Washington, D.C. and I'm going to give a speech at the White House, and after I do, I'm going to tie myself to the fence and refuse to leave until they agree to bring our troops home," Sheehan said in a telephone interview last week as the milestone approached.

"And I'll probably get arrested, and when I get out, I'll go back and do the same thing," she said.

The death toll among U.S. military forces since the March 2003 invasion stood at 1,996 on Sunday.

The milestone's approach prompted plans for hundreds of other demonstrations across the United States, but for Sheehan, each military death in the Iraqi war has been a tragedy.

"To me, every single member since Number One has been tragic and needless and unnecessary," she said. "My son was somewhere around 615, and I've been working so hard for peace since my son was killed and now almost 1,400 more soldiers have been killed since Casey died."

"On the day after the 2,000th reported U.S. military death in Iraq, people will gather in communities across the U.S. to say that the countries pro-peace majority wants Congress to stop the deaths by stopping the dollars that are funding the war," a coalition of anti-war groups said online at www.afsc.org.

"The clock has stopped ticking for 2,000 Americans in Iraq, and once again there is a media craze, another reason for people to pay closer attention to the human cost of a lie, but for how long this time?" said Camilo Mejia, an Iraq combat veteran who served a year in prison for refusing to return to the war in Iraq.

"Perhaps it's time for the American public to realize that each death counts, American, Iraqi or otherwise," Mejia said in a statement.

FULL STORY

Caption This Photo

Tom DeLay's Mug Shot

The Most Important Criminal Case in American History

by James Moore

Patrick Fitzgerald has before him the most important criminal case in American history. Watergate, by comparison, was a random burglary in an age of innocence. The investigator’s prosecutorial authority in this present case is not constrained by any regulation. If he finds a thread connecting the leak to something greater, Fitzgerald has the legal power to follow it to the web in search of the spider. It seems unlikely, then, that he would simply go after the leakers and the people who sought to cover up the leak when it was merely a secondary consequence of the much greater crime of forging evidence to foment war. Fitzgerald did not earn his reputation as an Irish alligator by going after the little guy. Presumably, he is trying to find evidence that Karl Rove launched a covert operation to create the forged documents and then conspired to out Valerie Plame when he learned the fraud was being uncovered by Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

We may stand witness to a definitive American moment of democracy. The son of a New York doorman probably has in his hands, in many ways, the fate of the republic. Because far too many of us know and are aware of the crimes committed by our government in our name, we are unlikely to settle for a handful of minor indictments of bureaucrats. The last thing most of us believe in is the rule of law. We do not trust our government or the people we have elected but our constitution is still very much alive and we choose to believe that destiny has placed Patrick Fitzgerald at this time and this place in our history to save us from the people we elected. If the law cannot get to the truth of what has happened to the American people under the Bush administration, then we all may begin to hear the early death rattles of history’s greatest democracy.

Read more...

Quote of the Day

Buffon Watch

If politics is show business for ugly people, then I guess corporate journalism is intelligence work for stupid people. - Billmon

Saddam's Day In Court

Saddam Hussein during questioning

Much more is at stake than the fate of one man - L.A. Times

Congratulations Riverbend!

I've been saying all along that Riverbend should win an award. Well now she has, from the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage:

The third prize of 20,000 Euro went to:

* Riverbend (Iraq): Baghdad Burning. Girl Blog from Iraq, The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, New York, 2005 & Marion Boyars Publishers, London, 2005.

Riverbend, a young Iraqi woman, writes an Internet diary, using a pseudonym. Her commanding gift for observation, her intelligence and her extraordinary language skills make her account of the life of a normal Iraqi family, which has also been published in book form as Baghdad Burning, one of the most uniquely critical documents of life in this abused country under the conditions of the war and the US military occupation.

Bravo Riverbend!

Going Down...

Down...
down...

President Bush's job approval rating continues to plummet, with 39 percent of Americans surveyed in the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll supporting his performance, compared to 58 percent expressing disapproval.

The approval rating was lowest the poll has recorded during Bush's presidency . . .

It's time for the rats to jump ship.

By a margin of 50% to 44%, Americans want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush if he lied about the war in Iraq, according to a new poll commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org, a grassroots coalition that supports a Congressional investigation of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

The poll was conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs, the highly-regarded non-partisan polling company. The poll interviewed 1,001 U.S. adults on October 6-9.

The poll found that 50% agreed with the statement:

"If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable by impeaching him."

Hat tip to Sara

Counting "No's"

Iraqi Pollsters Audit Ballots For Unusually High "Yes" Tally

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraq's election commission announced Monday that officials were investigating "unusually high" numbers of "yes" votes in about a dozen provinces during Iraq's landmark referendum on a new constitution, raising questions about irregularities in the balloting.

Word of the review came as Sunni Arab leaders repeated accusations of fraud after initial reports from the provinces suggested the constitution had passed. Among the Sunni allegations are that police took ballot boxes from heavily "no" districts, and that some "yes" areas had more votes than registered voters.

The Electoral Commission made no mention of fraud, and an official with knowledge of the election process cautioned that it was too early to say whether the unusual numbers were incorrect or if they would have an effect on the outcome.

Irregularities in Shiite and Kurdish areas, expected to vote strongly "yes," may not affect the final outcome. The main electoral battlegrounds were provinces with mixed populations, two of which went strongly "yes." There were conflicting reports whether those two provinces were among those with questionable figures.

The Electoral Commission said it needed "a few more days" to produce final results, citing the need for the audit. - Yeahoo News

Iraqi bloggers weigh in here, here, and here.

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald will announce whether he will bring charges in the "Plame" case as early as Wednesday.

Let's hope Fitzgerald chops some heads.

Iraqis Vote

Iraqis voted today on a new constitution, in what many believe to be a political process tainted by US occupation that will only further divide the country along ethnic lines, thereby placing the oil wealth in the Kurdish north and Shiite south under the control of U.S. puppets, and thus leaving the Sunni minority politically and economically powerless. Surpisingly Sunni Arabs, who boycotted the election last January, showed up at the polls in high numbers in the hopes of defeating the constitution.

"I agree with the draft constitution," each ballot reads, in Arabic and Kurdish. On a blue field below are two squares, marked "Yes" and "No."

The ballot count is expected to show Sunnis overwhelmingly voted "no." Although Sunnis only represent 20% of the population, some speculate the higher-than-forecast turnout could tip the balance in their favor.

A poll last month by the International Republican Institute showed that of the more than 80 percent of Iraqis who plan to vote, only 49 percent believe that the charter represents the will of the Iraqi people. Opinion among Iraq's minority Sunni population is thought to be even more negative toward the constitution as currently written.

And if two-thirds of the voters in just three out of Iraq's 18 provinces vote "No," then the first post-Saddam constitution goes down to crashing defeat, throwing Iraq's entire future into doubt. The National Assembly would have the opportunity to try to rewrite the constitution in the event of a defeat, but some observers believe a defeat of the draft constitution Oct. could result in the disintegration of the country.

Sunnis say the federalist structure it proposes gives too much power to the predominantly Shiite region in the south and the predominantly Kurdish region in the north. The fact that those two regions control virtually all of the nation's oil wealth makes the Sunni concerns even greater.

A banner strung from the arched sandstone gate marking the southern border of Tikrit on Highway 1 reads: "No to a constitution that divides Iraq." In the city, the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni group, passed out copies of the constitution at a Sunni mosque Friday, urging worshippers to go to the polls to reject it. On the wall of one school, which will serve as a polling station, someone has scribbled in pencil: "Saddam Hussein is our hero." - San Francisco Chronicle

Whichever way the vote turns, don't expect the insurgency to go away. As long as the U.S. military occupies Iraq, the insurgents will continue to fight.

CANNON FODDER SLAUGHTER

As if another indication that the war has spun out of control was needed, an analysis of the latest casualty figures from Iraq shows that the National Guard and Reserves are now suffering a majority of the deaths. For two months running--August and September--the citizen soldier units accounted for 56% of the U.S. losses. (AP)

While any and all deaths are cause for mourning, the spike in casualties among the National Guard and Reserves--America's "Weekend Warriors"--is particularly alarming because of their traditional roles in war. Guardsmen and Reservists, who are often older than active duty Regulars, typically guard "quiet" fronts or fulfill rear echelon duties--occupying conquered territory, providing logistical support, staffing prisons and such. Offensive operations, defense of hotly-contested sectors and other frontline tasks are generally carried out by active duty Regulars.

Not so anymore. Regular Army and Marines now comprise just over half of the 152,000 troops deployed there, and they're stretched beyond their limits by an insurgent war that has no fronts in the traditional sense. National Guard, Army Reserve and Marine Corps Reserve units increasingly find themselves under direct fire from an invisible enemy operating "behind the lines" or while carrying out actual frontline duties because enough Regulars just aren't available.

According to Charles Krohn, former Army deputy chief of public affairs, the Guardsmen and Reservists are picking up the slack in what has turned out to be a poorly thought-out redesigning of the Army. We're running out of frontline soldiers.

"Decisions made years earlier made going to war in any significant way impossible without Guard and Reserve participation. But I can't imagine anyone postulated the situation we face today: We don't seem very anxious to bring back the draft and we can't get enough volunteers for a war that is not universally popular."(AP)

Guard and Reserve casualties will most likely continue to grow in the immediate future as even more of them are "freed" up for frontline tasks by the new deployment of 3,000 Air Force personnel (with more on the way) to take over their rear echelon duties. The Navy will also pitch in, retraining up to 4,000 sailors to serve as prison guards, cargo handlers and other jobs normally held by Guardsmen or Reserves.(LA Times)

So the Weekend Warriors will keep on dying in increasing numbers. The August and September casualty figures only emphasize what has become a trend. Overall, for the first nine months of 2005, National Guardsmen and Reservists accounted for 36% of the U.S. deaths, nearly double the 20% rate for 2004. Reflecting the older age of typical Guardsmen and Reservists, at least 20 of the dead in August and September were in their thirties, and four were in their forties. (anti-war.com)

But there is a method to this madness of using Guardsmen and Reservists as cannon fodder.

Lt. Gen. James Lovelace, the Army's deputy chief of staff for operations, said in an interview that the increased reliance on the Guard and Reserve in 2005 was deliberately planned to allow active-duty units like the 3rd Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne Division to complete a reorganization before they returned to Iraq.

"It bought us the time we needed," Lovelace said. (AP)

That ought to ease the pain some, General.

SUVs "DEFLATED," FRENCH-STYLE

Anti-SUV street theater has swept through selected neighborhoods in Paris. Spurred by the growing image of the SUV as the most egregious example of automotive pollution, Sous-Adjudant Marrant ("Sub-Warrant Officer Joker"), the mysterious, masked leader of Les Dégonflés ("The Deflated"), launched the campaign about five weeks ago. (LATimes)

Under cover of night, Marrant's troops target Jeep Cherokees, Porsche Cayennes and other four-wheel-drive vehicles parked on the tree-lined avenues and cobblestoned lanes of wealthy neighborhoods. The eco-guerrillas deflate tires without damaging them, smear doors with mud and paste handbills on windshields proclaiming that the vehicles are dangerous, polluting behemoths that do not belong in the city.

"We use the mud to say that if the owners will not take the four-wheel-drives to the countryside, we will bring the countryside to the four-wheel-drives," said Marrant...

"The point is to focus on consumers," he [added]... "We have to get past the idea that there's always a single, identifiable villain: the president, the corporation, the chief executive. Our campaign has to be very marketing, shocking, provocative. I want to make it fashionable to be anti-4x4."...

The campaign by The Deflated is just the latest escalation of anti-SUV activism in France, where there's growing support for a limitation or even a ban in Paris. Deputy Mayor Denis Baupin has ridiculed the SUV as "a caricature of a car." But his criticism goes even deeper.

"An SUV is totally useless for Paris," Baupin said in his speech [at a recent rally], blaming the recent devastating hurricanes in the U.S. on climate change caused by pollution. "The situation is striking: The country that refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol suffered from a climatic catastrophe…. We all feel sorry for the dead in New Orleans. But now maybe the United States should start considering that their development pattern is not to be repeated worldwide and that it causes environmental problems."

Marrant and the Deputy Mayor certainly have their points, but when it comes to automotive pollution, consumption of fossil fuels and global warming, the SUV as the worst offender may be the symbol, but it's hardly the sole culprit. It's clever to use the SUV to highlight the problem, but the real villain, of course, is the internal combustion engine itself and the 200 million or so motor vehicles of all types that it powers across this country and the other hundreds of millions around the world. Getting rid of the wanton waste and pollution of SUVs is a good first step in the right direction, but until we face the root problem of fossil fuel-powered engines and deal with it, oil wars and global warming will continue.

Killer SUVs

Not surprisingly, SUVs also kill more pedestrians, especially the elderly, a new study confirms.

Posted by Diana at 07:09 AM | Comments (0)

A Desperate Struggle For Oil

High Oil Prices Meet with Anger Worldwide

Indonesians struggle for queue numbers to take cash from the government. This weekend the government said gas prices would nearly double.
(Photo: Yusuf Ahmad / Reuters)

Much Ado About Nothing

I was not going to comment on the brouhaha over Republican radio talk-show host William Bennet's widely quoted statement because I considered it much ado about nothing. But I soon realized that there is a deeper issue here -- the corruption of public discourse by both political parties.

Let me first state that I wish to be counted among the few liberal bloggers willing to defend a Republican like William Bennet, on the principle that every person, no matter whether a "D" or "R" follows their name, has the right to think, reason, and speak independently, without coersion or punishment, or the pressure to conform to "groupthink," for that is the very nature of the First Amendment right to "free speech."

Leading Democrats have indeed made "much ado about nothing" when they called on William Bennet to apologize for his "racist" remark. John Cole, Matthew Yglesias, and Brad DeLong agree, Bennet has nothing to apologize for, because, in fact, his statement was not racist.

John Cole:

There is nothing for him to apologize for regarding this statement. It is a statement of fact, he was not advocating it, and, in fact, he noted that it would be an “impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do.”

Similarly, if you wanted to lower the rates of obesity in the United States, you could shoot all fat people. But that would be an”impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do.”

Bill Bennet is an ass. But flailing him over this and attacking him as ‘racist’ for these remarks is petty, juvenile, and just plain wrong. In the big picture, Bill Bennett may have a lot of things to answer for, but this isn’t one of them.

Matthew Yglesias

Not only is Bennett clearly not advocating a campaign of genocidal abortion against African-Americans, but the empirical claim here is unambiguously true. Similarly, if you aborted all the male fetuses, all those carried by poor women, or all those carried by Southern women, the crime rate would decline. Or, at least, in light of the fact that southern people, poor people, black people, and male people have a much greater propensity to commit crime than do non-southern, non-black, non-poor, or non-male people that would have to be our best guess. The consequences, clearly, would be far-reaching and unpredictable, but the basic demographic and criminological points here can't be seriously disputed.

Nor, as Bennett says, can the moral point be seriously disputed -- doing any of that would be wrong. Contra Harry Reid, Bennett has nothing to apologize for. Or, rather, Bennett has a great deal to apologize for, but none of it pertains to this statement. He's still a bad dude, but for totally different reasons.

Brad DeLong

Bennett did not "concede" that "aborting all African-American babies 'would be... morally reprehensible.'" That was his point. His caller said: "Abortion is bad because it has worsened the financing of Social Security." Bennett says: "Stay focused. We're anti-abortion not because we think that abortion is a means that leads to bad ends like a higher Social Security deficit; we're anti-abortion because abortion is bad; make arguments like 'abortion is bad because it increases the Social Security deficit' and other people will make arguments like 'abortion is good because it lowers the crime rate' and we'll lose sight of the main point."

Bennett is attempting a reductio ad absurdum argument.

Never attempt a reductio ad absurdum argument on talk radio. You can't keep exact control over your phrasing in real time, and so somebody is bound to think you are endorsing the horrible absurdity that you are rejecting.

To be clear, the dictionary defines reductio ad absurdum as "disproof of a proposition by showing that it leads to absurd or untenable conclusions."

With that in mind, let's review the full context of what Bennet said. Read on:

From the September 28 broadcast of Salem Radio Network's Bill Bennett's Morning in America:

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.

William Bennet does a good job of explaining what he meant, so I don't need to do it for him:

"On Wednesday, a caller to my radio show proposed the idea that one good argument for the pro-life position would be that if we didn't have abortions, Social Security would be solvent. I stated my doubts about such a thesis, as well as my opposition to such a form of argument (the audio of the call is available at my Website: bennettmornings.com).

"I then stated that such extrapolations of this argument can cut both ways, and cited the current bestseller, Freakonomics, which discusses the authors' thesis that abortion reduces crime.

Then putting my philosophy professor's hat on, I went on to reveal the limitations of such arguments by showing the absurdity in another such argument, along the same lines. I entertained what law school professors call 'the Socratic method' and what I would hope good social science professors still use in their seminars. In so doing, I suggested a hypothetical analogy while at the same time saying the proposition I was using about blacks and abortion was 'impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible,' just to ensure those who would have any doubt about what they were hearing, or for those who tuned in to the middle of the conversation.

"The issues of crime and race have been on many people's minds, and tongues, for the past month or so--in light of the situation in New Orleans; and the issues of race, crime, and abortion are well aired and ventilated in articles, the academy, the think tank community, and public policy. Indeed the whole issue of crime and race is not new in social science, nor popular literature. One of the authors of Freakonomics, himself, had an extended exchange on the discussion of these issues on the Internet some years back--which was also much debated in the think tank community in Washington.

"A thought experiment about public policy, on national radio, should not have received the condemnations it has. Anyone paying attention to this debate should be offended by those who have selectively quoted me, distorted my meaning, and taken out of context the dialogue I engaged in this week. Such distortions from 'leaders' of organizations and parties is a disgrace not only to the organizations and institutions they serve, but to the First Amendment.

In sum, anyone who was paying attention and is intellectually honest with themselves, knows that Bennet was using the analogy of aborting blacks to illustrate the dangerous nature of the caller's thought process by demonstrating how that process could be used to rationalize the most pernicious ideas. Now, if anyone, whether Republican, Democrat, Independent or politically unaligned, has to fear the indignities of smear campaigns for making reasoned arguments in their own rhetorical style, it will have, and already has had, a chilling effect on public discourse, and that's as dangerous as the real proponents of eugenics. If one has to fear being misinterpreted and taken out of context, if each of us feels that they have to "watch what they say" in public, then this society is doomed to spiral down into the deep dark pit that some of the best thinkers of the past century warned about -- and then God help us, for nobody else can.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?… Has it ever occurred to your, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?…The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” - George Orwell, 1984

Propagandists “rely for the most part on repetition, supression and rationalization - the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the supression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party.” -- Aldous Huxley, Propaganda in a Democratic Society, Brave New World Revisited (1958).

A MODEST PROPOSAL: The Up-Side of Crime

Former Secretary of Education William Bennett may have stumbled upon the solution to crime in this country when he said recently on his radio show in response to a question on abortion and declining crime rates:

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. (Media Matters)

Few fair-minded people took literally the Pro-Lifer's musings (fewer still of his critics acknowledged his second sentence), and even Mr. Bennett himself disagreed with the subtext. But it was there nonetheless.

To wit: If what the ex-War on Drugs czar asserted (but then vigorously disavowed) about a connection between race and crime is even remotely true, it follows that since the 240,000,000 or so whites in the US numerically commit most of the crimes, aborting all caucasian babies would pretty much end the problem as we know it. Not only would simple burglary, petty thievery, assault and battery be reduced significantly; white-dominated offenses like serial murder, school massacres, hate crimes, toxic waste dumping, stock market swindling, abortion clinic bombing, jaywalking, slumlording and "going postal" could be eliminated altogether. Hallelujah!

Whoa! Wait a minute! Before we embrace the End of Crime, have we thought this thing through?

With such a drastic drop in nasty behavior, wouldn't the whole Crime Industry in this country collapse? What would be left for the police to do? Get laid off in droves, I imagine, along with their colleagues in the district attorney's and public defender's offices. Police departments wouldn't need much more than Sheriff Andy Taylor and Deputy Barney Fife to keep an eye on things. Wouldn't need many judges either.

And what would become of prison guards and their powerful unions, not to mention parole boards, probation officers, drug rehab counselors and that whole bureaucratic apparatus? Fiscal conservatives would also suffer when privatized prisons and the corporations that own them, the contractors and laborers who build them, and the high school dropouts that staff them are no longer needed (and are weaned off the dole). Businesses that currently take advantage of prison labor would have to go back to exploiting illegal immigrants, cripples and the blind, or just outsource the work. That's an awful lot of jobs and investments to throw away. And in some cases, it would even become a matter of doing without. Could enough self-respecting Americans willing to make, say, license plates at convict wages ever be found?

Entire professions would also have to readjust. With no more crime, "tough-on-crime" politicians, TV news anchors and newspaper editors would have to find new bogeymen to scare the public. TV "reality" shows like Cops, and "based-on-real-events" dramas like the Law & Order franchise would have to evolve into cooking or poker shows. Skinhead rockers hailing hate crimes and moviemakers glorifying Mafia murders to operatic arias would be forced instead to sing the praises of fishing. Every lawyer would have to brush up on divorce law. Without criminals, who would Detroit sell getaway cars to?

Then there are those who help us deal with our fear of crime. What would happen to all of the businesses and people that make and/or sell car alarms, home security systems, paper shredders, lo-jacks, jimmy-proof locks, bullet-proof vests, burglar-proof doors, wrought iron window bars, surveillance cameras, motion sensors, drug-testing kits, attack dogs, mace, pepper spray and those numerous other gizmos and services?

And let's not forget GUNS. With far less criminals on the streets, sales of "Saturday Night Specials" would plummet. But that would be a drop in the bucket compared to lost sales of machine guns, assault rifles, shotguns, grenade launchers, .45 magnum pistols and other goodies designed solely to protect private homes against criminal intruders bent on theft or mayhem. Not to mention all that ammunition. The NRA would be pissed.

Enough said.

Crime and its exploitation--Crime, Inc., if you will--is a big business, billions and billions of dollars and countless jobs worth. Truly stamping out crime would upset this applecart, and too many vested interests (few of whom are actually criminals) depend on it for sustenance. So, as far as embarking on our glorious End of Crime campaign goes...

Never mind.