Bill Bennett Attacked by the Angry Left

As we have all heard by now, the Angry Left is in a tizzy over remarks made by Bill Bennett on his morning radio show. Now I don't usually listen to this show; I have only so much time in the day and I listen to other shows in any case. But it looks to me as though this is another attempt by the left to smear a conservative without having to deal with the conservative ideas that the show is about. And there is little doubt that the heart of the matter boils down to the fact that the left is out of gas intellectually.

In making his comments Bill Bennett was not advocating a new eugenics program against blacks; far from it as Bennett is an opponent of abortion. But the hypothetical point he was making was predicated on the idea that there is indeed a crime problem in the black community, particularly in urban areas.

"Freakonomics" author Steven D. Levitt argues that if you account for certain external factors, the differences between white crime and black crime are substantially reduced:

It is true that, on average, crime involvement in the U.S. is higher among blacks than whites. Importantly, however, once you control for income, the likelihood of growing up in a female-headed household, having a teenage mother, and how urban the environment is, the importance of race disappears for all crimes except homicide.

But the problem I have with this argument is that dysfunctional urban environments are not randomly distributed. Indeed, the notion that crime is caused by poverty rather than poverty being caused by crime is an idea whose time has come and gone. The real issue is thus not race or income, but culture. There is a cultural pathology in today's black urban environment which is a direct cause of the problems, including crime, which have proven so difficult to eradicate. The question is where does that pathology come from and how to get rid of it.

I don't think that Bill Bennett owes anyone an apology for his remarks as the facts and evidence back up his point of view. Everyone who cares to investigate the subject knows that years of police and FBI statistics show urban blacks to be responsible for far and away more crime than their numbers in the population would suggest. This is an undeniable fact.

But notice that in all of their chest-thumping the left fails to deal honestly with the underlying issue.

Who controls the inner cities where poor blacks live? Who set up the welfare state? Which political party has said that children don't really need fathers and that the family is a "artificial social construct?" Who created the urban blight that runs through poor areas of big cities?

The dysfunctional areas of urban America, such as we recently saw in New Orleans, are the direct result of liberal ideas being put into practice for generations. The people there have indeed been taken in by liberal ideas and they have paid the price in lost futures, crime, violence and dependency with no hope of a better life.

Rush is right when he says that liberals are using political correctness to avoid facing facts that refute their utopian fantasy. This is just another example. And the dysfunction we find in the black inner city will only be eliminated when the ideas that created it in the first place are replaced with a philosophy of self-reliance, responsibility and self-motivated achievement.