What's the bottom line on the Bill Bennett issue from a few weeks ago? Mark Steyn, in his column in the current National Review, nails it... as he usually does. One of the ugliest aspects of abortion on demand (and there are so many ugly aspects to pick from) is the racism of it all. Steyn says:

...when you set aside moral objections to abortion, the utilitarian approach is a question of balance. Abortion doesn’t fall on all fetuses equally. In China and other Asian cultures, it lowers the pool of girl babies, resulting in very disproportionately male societies. Thus, “a woman’s right to choose” leaves you with a lot fewer women to choose from. Even in America, not all women exercise their right to choose equally: The abortion rate for black women is four times higher than that for white women. “A woman’s right to choose” has become, like so many other “progressive” causes, an issue in which one’s enthusiasm for it is inversely proportional to one’s engagement with it. For middle-class female Democrats, “a woman’s right to choose” is like “Free Tibet”: a bumper sticker that appropriates some other crowd’s problem for the purposes of advertising your moral superiority.

Nobody knocks it out of the park like Steyn. He's dead on, of course... although the white American liberal does make for such an easy target. Of course, we are talking about people who're lead around by the nose by Michael Moore and his ilk... people who think that plastering your car with bumper stickers qualifies as actually doing something.

Steyn continues, pinpointing what's really wrong with the whole Bill Bennett flap:

Bill Bennett explicitly rejected as “reprehensible” the hypothetical mass abortion of black babies, and the usual charlatans, race-baiters, and shakedown artists jumped all over him. But the statistics suggest that that mass abortion of black babies is actually going on, and their community’s self-appointed spokespersons are largely silent. You can’t blame Howard Dean for preferring to beat up Bill Bennett. Nor can you blame the official racism industry, now so large and lucrative and employing so many highly remunerated panjandrums from the Reverend Jackson down that it has a far greater interest than the Ku Klux Klan in maintaining old-school racism. But even the most cursory glance at the facts suggests an ever wider divergence of interest between two key pillars of what’s left of the Democrats — the self-congratulatory white liberals and the black-lobby fodder.

Such an irony. Bill Bennett, who does oppose the abortion of black babies, has been labeled a racist by those who support it.

Only in America.