The Race Card

You have no doubt heard about the remarks made by Bill Bennett that aborting black babies would lower the crime rate. You might have thought that Bennett was pro-life before this. However, the so-callled Main Stream media has made it clear that he is a racist Republican (is that redundant?). If you have not yet read the actual remarks, they can be found here.

Larry Elder examines some of the criticism and makes this interesting point:

How does one artfully say that out of a small percentage of America's population -- 13 percent -- blacks account for 37.2 percent of all those arrested for violent crimes, 54.4 percent of all robbery arrestees, and are the known offenders in 51.3 percent of all murders? The murder rate in the city of New Orleans stands at over 7.5 times the national average, and authorities convict only one in four arrested for homicide.

Read the whole article.

I said all that to say this: The TV news coverage of Katrina focused almost exclusively on the poor blacks from New Orleans. Forget the rich black folks and rich or poor white folks who lost all their property in neighboring Mississippi or in Alabama or Florida from the four previous hurricanes. Forget also the welfare mentality that led to the evacuation failure, just blame Bush for his failure to rescue the New Orleans residents.

An eMail circulated last week with the title "Things I learned from watching TV" that skewered the media coverage and some of the absurd events in New Orleans - like people who were "acting out of hunger" stealing large-screen plasma TVs, complaining that the government-provided credit cards were not enough, etc. My son sent it to me and I apparently forwarded it on to others. One of the recipients - a brother in Christ - complained that it was offensive. I had to admit that, if you forgot about the media coverage and focused only on the points in the eMail, you could conclude that the message was attacking black people instead of the New Orleans insanity. I apologized, sincerely. Apparently Bill Bennett is not the only one who made a mistake last week.