Suicide, Bennett, Rather

Suicide bomber?
Some poor soul in Norman, OK blew himself up Saturday night outside a packed stadium watching the Oklahoma Vs. Kansas State football game. Police have dubbed the tragedy a routine suicide. Hmm, is any suicide really all that routine? And how many self tortured people go to all of the trouble to blow themselves up? Think about the amount of time, effort and research required for that method of suicide. Wouldn’t it be easier to find a tall building to leap off, a garage to park the still running car with the door closed, a razor or a gun – I mean after all it’s Oklahoma? I think something else is going on here.

Even if it's true, you can’t say that!
Bill Bennett is in trouble for stating a truism. Mr. Bennett, in order to prove the absurdity of a caller’s argument, made an absurd argument himself. Mr. Bennett said that crime could be reduced by aborting all black babies. Now Mr. Bennett is being a called a racist.

The fact that what he said happens to be true has no bearing on the argument. He used the words black and crime in proximity of one another in the same sentence, therefore he is in fact an insensitive racist - case close, end of argument. What if Bennett had said, if you really wanted to reduce crime, you would abort all white babies? That would be true too. Whites commit more crimes than blacks. Blacks happen to commit more crimes proportional to their percentage of the total population and happen to commit the largest proportion of that crime against other blacks. Too bad. You can’t say any of that without being a racist.

Also, what goes unreported or under reported was the crux of the point Bennett was making which was that you cannot justify a moral end by an immoral means. If Bennett had used NASCAR as an example like, if you want to reduce bad dancing and atrocious fashion sense you’d neuter and spay everyone at a NASCAR event, he’d be fine. He wouldn’t even have had to go on and say that such an action would be reprehensible. See, we have a sense of humor. We have not been raised to claim victimhood at every turn. And we recognize the truth even if it hurts a bit. So I wear my loud red and black Earnhardt shirt on race day, and dance at weddings after 8-10 beers. Pointing out that the shirt doesn’t really “go” with anything or that I can’t dance is a restatement of the obvious and changes nothing. Just don’t say “black” and “crime” in the same sentence.

Dan’s back.
Dan Rather is making the rounds of some talk shows. He showed up on some PBS broadcast nobody saw and Larry King. Marvin Kalb made a rather idiotic statement to Dan about how he – Rather - became the focus of the National Guard story rather than the “focus” of the story George Bush. How odd that the guy who produces fake documents to prove the President of the United States is a lying cheat 45 days before a national election would become the focus of the story rather than what the fake papers allege.* Listening to and reading the transcripts of Kalb/Rather and King/Rather got to me to thinking that that must be what a conversation between Joe Isuzu and John Levit’s “pathological liar” character on Saturday Night Live must sound like. JI: “The story is true. You can trust me.” PL: "Yeah, Yeah, George Bush killed Kennedy. Shot him from that grassy knoll. I was there and I saw the whole thing, you know. That’s the ticket.”

* To call them forgeries would insult forgers everywhere, even a school chum who forged notes from his parents to explain school absences and was only caught after his grandfather had passed for 4th or 5th time.