View From the Bushes

I was in quite the funk yesterday, and so I didn't post. The reasons for my funk are not something I can go into right at the moment, because things are still up in the air, but hopefully I'll be able to post in more detail soon. I know that I personally hate it when people say stuff like that, but there it goes. I thought I needed to offer some explanation for yesterday's absence, but it has to be, of necessity, fairly sparse. Anyway, that's enough obfuscation for now. Moving on...

The hot topic before Bush's lackluster nomination of Harriet Miers was some comments Bill Bennett made. He said:

I do know that it's true that 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 impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.

Well, predictably quite a few people have said he was a racist, just as predictable, but far less defensible, others have accussed him of advocating the murder of black babies, which even a casual reading of what he said does not support, but what some people have remarked on is how some liberals who are clearly firmly in the pro-choice camp have suddenly started referring to aborted fetuses as babies or even people. The writer I linked to above opines that it's a matter of "utilitarianism." I would have to say it's because on some level everyone knows that they're babies and people particularly when we're speaking of them in the aggregate. Suddenly it's not one person deciding whether one pregnancy will be allowed to come to term: it's genocide.

Somewhat less funky than yesterday
Ross