William Bennett, former Republican education secretary and anti-drug crusader:

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 impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.

And if you wanted to reduce the number of stupid, racist comments being made in 2005, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could go back in time and give William Bennett’s dad a goddamn condom.

Every once in a while, I actually come within, oh, a light year or so of feeling sorry for George W. This latest outpurst comes right as he’s just barely getting back on his feet from his mom’s little contribution to America’s domestic output of blithe elite cluelessness:

Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them.

In my most cynical moments, I think this is all part of Karl Rove’s devious, brimstone-laced master plan: keep Americans talking in terms as divisive as possible, and he can keep eking out Republican majorities. Then I remember one of the basic rules of politics: never assume malice when foolishness is just as good an explanation.

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