Bennett's Big Mouth | Tragic Comedy

Scott Hardie | October 16, 2005
I know I'm two weeks late to discuss this, but how in the hell does Bill Bennett still have his job? (link) I've made plenty of unintentionally offensive comments in my day and I understand the point Bennett was trying to make, using an absurd scenario such as aborting all black babies to show how insane we could get trying to come up with solutions to crime rates. But how long has he been on the air, a day? You can't bring up fucking genocide, not to mention associate a whole race of people with high crime rates, without enraging a whole lot of your audience. It took me a while to understand the uproar when Anna once suggested hypothetically that Lori didn't love her kids; of course Anna didn't mean it literally, but to make such an offensive suggestion without any cognizance of how revolting it is just makes it that much worse. I thought Trent Lott was unjustly run out of town for an innocent comment about Strom Thurmond, but I'll say this comment by Bennett is worthy of him never having a soapbox in American culture again. A comment like that is simply unacceptable in any context.