Every now and then, a person with impressive educational and professional credentials, some living under his belt and a record of achievement opens his mouth in public and gives expression to a thought so outrageous, ignorant, foul or cruel that it makes you want to repeat what I heard a woman exclaim when her child asked for an especially expensive cell phone: “Is you done gone a fool?”

William Bennett is the latest to prompt this question.

The man is an old hand around Washington -- a twice and former federal official and still a government groupie -- and, as such, he was presumed to possess some sophisticated political instincts. At the very least, he was supposed to have that internal editing device that changes, slows or deletes a controversial thought before it slithers over the tongue.

Maybe Bennett’s gizmo wasn’t working the day he uttered words that have betrayed him as a bigot, if not a fool. The world has heard it by now: “You could abort every black baby in his country and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.”

What Bennett did not do on his syndicated radio show that day was suggest that every black baby should be aborted. The “impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible” denouncement was not an afterthought.

But he seems to think we are confused. Judging from his protestations about the uproar over his comments, Bennett believes critics think he was calling for the annihilation of the black race. He keeps harping about the hypothetical nature of his argument, saying that his remarks were taken out of context.

In a statement, Bennett declared that "a thought experiment about public policy, on national radio, should not have received the condemnations it has."

The confusion is his. It was the stupid, mean-spirited, negatively stereotypical, misleading and politically irresponsible tone of his comment that raised hackles -- this notion that crime is, first and foremost, a black thing. The fact that he couched the argument in genocidal terms made it simply unbearable.

It would be like attaching colonization, war, powder cocaine use, serial killing, war crimes, racial discrimination, invasion, the methamphetamine epidemic and slavery to white Americans, portraying them as exclusively liable. Add to that the suggestion that  those scourges could be reduced or eliminated if we got rid of all the white people.

Now there’s a “thought experiment” that I’ll bet you would hardly be taken as a casual musing on a fine autumn day.

What is most surprising about Bill Bennett is not that he associates black people with crime. If statistics hold, one in three black males born today will rendezvous with the criminal justice system.

But Bennett is supposed to be educated enough and savvy enough to understand that the probabilities have everything to do with the likelihood of poverty and, after that, the gaping disparity between the way black and white males are arrested, charged, prosecuted and punished -- as well as a “war on drugs” that has swollen the prison population by punishing crack cocaine in multiples of the sentences for powder cocaine.

Instead, he ran with the simple-minded, redneck philosophy that notices only effect and pays no attention to the cause.

What in the world was he thinking?

Makes you wonder what troubles we could avoid if we could abort all the fools.