Let’s get this straight: A noted conservative gets raked over the coals for allegedly espousing belief in a loopy theory in which he does not actually believe, while a liberal magazine parroting the very same theory does so with relative impunity. George Orwell, call your office.

The former Secretary of Education, William Bennett, has aroused the wrath of the left since he supposedly called on his radio show for aborting all black children as a way of reducing crime. “Supposedly” because a look at the full transcript – we found a copy on the Web site of the Weekly Standard – shows that he said no such thing.

In response to a caller’s suggestion that eliminating abortion would provide more workers to fund Social Security, Mr. Bennett pointed out that it can be dangerous to try to debate abortion without discussing its basic morality. Mr. Bennett noted that a theory relating legalized abortion to falling crime rates has been put forward by others, although he doesn’t believe it’s correct. Only then did he say, “But I do know that 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. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.”

If Mr. Bennett wanted to discuss the crime rate among African Americans, that wasn’t the way to do it. But who are the Democrats, fresh from not denouncing Congressman Rangel for comparing President Bush to Bull Connor, to make an issue of it? Yet Nancy Pelosi took to the floor of the House to charge that “These words are a direct hit at our children.” Senator Kennedy chimed in that “racist comments have no place on the public airways or in civil discourse in this country.” The White House piled on, announcing, “The president believes the comments were not appropriate,” without bothering to point out that the Democrats had misrepresented Mr. Bennett’s remark and had no standing to start with. Mayor Bloomberg and Fernando Ferrer duly weighed in against Mr. Bennett, too.

It turns out, moreover, that an economist who does posit the theory Mr. Bennett rejects, Steven Levitt, was the subject of a fawning profile in the New York Times Magazine in 2003, which mentioned a paper he co-authored in 2001 that suggested a link between abortion and crime. We couldn’t find a letter to the editor from either Ms. Pelosi or Mr. Kennedy.

It was conservatives questioning Mr. Levitt’s research; James Q. Wilson, raised questions about some of the methodology and assumptions in a review for the July-August number of Commentary of the bestselling book, “Freakonomics,” that Mr. Levitt co-authored with the writer of that fawning New York Times profile, Stephen Dubner. Somehow everyone’s all worked up about Mr. Bennett, but not about Messrs. Dubner and Levitt, who now write a column for the Times magazine.

More broadly, the news here, in our view, is that Mr. Bennett has managed to formulate an issue on which the left seems upset with the idea of abortion. One doesn’t have to be a pro-life absolutist to recognize that as progress.