Oh, And About Bill Bennett

There has been some surprise that when pressed, Bennett insisted on reiterating the racist position that more Blacks = more crime. As a former Reagan Secretary of Education whose job it was, on behalf of an overtly racist president, to oppose affirmative, promote school vouchers, and deride multicultural courses, Bennett has already demonstrated an ideological commitment to racist ideas.

The notable thing here is not that Bennett has shown himself to be racist, but that he is expressing his racist views in more extremist terms. Rather than couch racism within elevated discourse about education or drug policy, he is saying the sort of thing David Duke or Hal Turner might say.

Bennett is now behaving as a "transmitter," to use David Neiwert's term:

This crossover is facilitated by figures I call "transmitters" -- ostensibly mainstream conservatives who seem to cull ideas that often have their origins on the far right, strip them of any obviously pernicious content, and present them as "conservative" arguments. These transmitters work across a variety of fields. In religion, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are the best-known examples, though many others belong in the same category. In politics, the classic example is Patrick Buchanan, while his counterpart in the field of conservative activism is Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation.

In the media, Rush Limbaugh is the most prominent instance, and Michael Savage is a close second, but there are others who have joined the parade noticeably in the past few years: Andrew Sullivan, for instance, and of course Ann Coulter. On the Internet, the largest single transmitter of right-wing extremism is FreeRepublic.com, whose followers -- known as "Freepers" -- have engaged in some of the more outrageous acts of thuggery against their liberal targets.

Consciously or unconsciously, Bennett has sensed that the current climate in America invites this sort of blurring of the line between mainstream conservatism and right wing extremism. Call it a response to wider public discussions of race, post-Katrina. Call it getting with the program of the right, already well underway.