there's an argument making its way around wonkish circles which claims that Mr. Bennett's unpleasant ruminations on race and crime were merely an extreme illustration of a point he was trying to make about the immorality of abortion.

This I do not buy. If you want a strong statistical correlation between birthstate and crime prevention, the most obvious form of useful infanticide would be killing boys. Odd that didn't occur to him.

However: Mr. Bennett made it clear today that he was not exploring his listeners' prejudices, he was expressing his own

TAPPER: But why immediately link blacks and crime? Bennett told me on the phone that race was on his mind because of recent stories in the media about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

BENNETT (audio clip): Stories about looting and shooting and gangs and roving gangs and so on. ... I'm sorry if people are hurt, I really am. But we can't say this is an area of American public policy that we're not allowed to talk about race and crime.

Yep. Stories about looting and shooting and roving gangs.

Except that as it turned out, what there really was in New Orleans was almost none of the violence we heard about (except mostly for the Gretna Sheriff's Dept) and people who were left to die by the federal government engaging in that activity which in white people is referred to as "finding food"

Bennett wasn't trying to make a point. He was playing poke the liberals, and he said something foul and racist, which, amazingly, people who should know better are giving him a pass on.

They shouldn't.

edit: Still think he might have a point? Well, read this and see if you think that the wildly disparate treatment given to black and white first offenders, from referral to prosecution to sentencing makes you think that the problem is something intrinsic to black children rather than a criminal justice system with an attitude like Mr. Bennett's.

What's most interesting here is that he claims he was making reference to Freakonomics. Here, the author of Freakonomics on the abortion question raised in his book

As an aside, it has been both fascinating and disturbing to me how the media have insisted on reporting this as a study about race, when race really is not an integral part of the story. The link between abortion and unwantedness, and also between unwantedness and later criminality, have been shown most clearly in Scandinavian data. Abortion rates among African-Americans are higher, but overall, far more abortions are done by whites. None of our analysis is race-based because the crime data by race is generally not deemed reliable.

and yet somehow Bennett got to race. Fancy that.