Racist abortion is evil--but eugenicist abortion is ok?(INSIDE REPORT)

Neo-conservative celebrity William Bennett made a handsome career as a political appointee--first with the National Endowment for the Humanities, then as secretary of education, and finally as the first "Drug Czar." (incidentally, all of those positions were in federal agencies not authorized by the Constitution.) He then spun off an even more lucrative career as a public tutor, as the credited author of a ghost-written compilation of stories entitled The Book of Virtues and later as director of various ad-hoc neo-con front groups, such as Americans for Victory over Terror.

In his latest guise as a talk-show host, Bennett provoked outrage by suggesting that it would be possible to reduce the crime rate by aborting all black children. His point, of course, was that while some people might see that course of action to be statistically valid, it would be utterly abhorrent. Liberal commentators who regard abortion as the central sacrament of their political creed assailed Bennett with gleeful, hypocritical abandon.

Patricia E. Bauer, mother of a child with Down syndrome, underscored one aspect of that hypocrisy in an October 22 syndicated column. "If it's unacceptable for William Bennett to link abortion even conversationally with a whole class of people (and, of course, it is), why then do we as a society view abortion as justified and unremarkable in the case of another class of ...