"SLOTS" ON HANNITY & colmes

As I mentioned below, Bennett came on H&C to try to clean up his mess and I'm going to go through some of his statements.

Slots begins by making a false statement:

A caller suggested he was opposed to abortion because he said if there were more babies there would be, eventually, more tax payers and a larger GNP, a smaller deficit.

The caller limited himself to discussing the implications for Social Security and did not mention GNP or smaller deficit. (I have also heard this argument from callers to other wingnut radio shows. I suspect some other wingnut started this meme but I haven't tracked it down.) He claimed on H&C that:

I said you want to be careful with that kind of argument because someone could postulate a situation where child's not likely to be a productive taxpayer.

Bennett did bring up productivity but he disagreed with the caller not because of productivity concerns but because of (1) our ignorance about the economic effects of abortion and (2) an economic analysis could cut both ways and gave the example from Freakonomics:

All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up.

Next, the caller and Bennett agree that they don't believe the Freakonomic thesis: abortion has led to a lower crime rate. Slots then made his egregious statement about aborting all black babies.

Back to H&C, Slots claimed that:

I said make the case of abortion on the basis of life and protecting life.

This is not true, at least based on the transcript provided by MediaMatters and from my own recall. Slots could have made this argument immediately to the caller but he didn't. He first brought up productivity and then moved to Freakonomics. I also listened to his subsequent show and Slots claimed that he had read Freakonomics. If that were true, he either forgot or skimmed the part about abortion not reducing the number of children born. According to Freakonomics, it simply postpones the births and has a neglible effect on total births.


Slots then tells colmes:

There are real things in the real world, and there are people who believe we should take such monstrous steps.

Here he is referring to the forced abortions of black babies. Sadly, I do believe there are some people who have argued for this but I am not aware of any and it certainly hasn't been widely reported on in the media.

Before saying this, Slots gives colmes some of the context for his statements:

But there is a very big literature, as you know, about single parenthood in crime, about race in crime, and about poverty in crime. And we've been talking about all these things lately in the context of New Orleans and other things.

As I wrote below, the intial reports of violence in NO were greatly exaggerated and it seemed to be more important to the wingnuts such as O'Reilly than the incompetence of FEMA and Michael Brown. I also recall a number of threads on the AOL Katrina boards that emphasized the violence. Some of them were flat-out racist.

It seems to me that Slots was also wrapped up in the violent urban black meme and that's why he mentioned aborting all black babies. Bennett says we don't know enough about the general effects of abortion on crime or the economy but HE knows that aborting ALL black babies would reduce the crime rate.

Near the end of the interview, Bennett tells Hannity that on his radio show:

We talk about serious things in a serious way.

This is simply a lie. For example, Bennett never once mentioned the 12/03 Guardian Ad Litem report I sent him that refuted the many hateful lies told about Michael Schiavo.