The injustice of the attacks on Bill Bennett today is beyond belief. Bennett was actually arguing against making big social-science claims based on faulty social-science evidence, not trying to make one.

According to the transcript up at David Brock’s noxious Media Matters, someone called Bill Bennett’s show to talk about how, if abortion had remained illegal, there would be enough people to fund Social Security. Bennett then said he didn’t know if that would be true, and in effect compared that idea to the one in the bestselling book Freakonomics, which argues, as Bennett said, that “one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up.”

Bennett’s caller said, “I don’t think that statistic is accurate.” And Bennett said, “I don’t think it is either. I don’t think it is either.” Then he bumbled his next words a little bit because he said, “I do know 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.”

Any remotely fair person would acknowledge that Bennett simply misspoke. He was summarizing the argument in Freakonomics in order, five seconds later, to argue AGAINST it. “”These far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky,” he said. In short, he didn’t mean to say the Freakonomics argument about abortion and crime was “true” because he was actually arguing it was FALSE.