Bill Bennett's Bad Bet: The Bookmaker of Virtues

[DdC]

Sinners have long cherished the fantasy that William Bennett, the virtue magnate, might be among our number. The news over the weekend—that Bennett's $50,000 sermons and bestselling moral instruction manuals have financed a multimillion dollar gambling habit—has lit a lamp of happiness in even the darkest hearts. As the joyous word spread, crack flowed like water through inner-city streets, family court judges began handing out free divorces, children lit bonfires of The Book of Virtues, More Virtuous Virtues, Who Cheesed My Virtue?, Moral Tails: Virtue for Dogs, etc. And cynics everywhere thought, for just a moment: Maybe there is a God after all.

If there were a Pulitzer Prize for Schadenfreude (joy in the suffering of others), Newsweek's Jonathan Alter and Joshua Green of the Washington Monthly would surely deserve it for bringing us this story. They are shoo-ins for the Public Service category in any event. Schadenfreude is an unvirtuous emotion of which we should be ashamed. Bill Bennett himself was always full of sorrow when forced to point out the moral failings of other public figures. But the flaws of his critics don't absolve Bennett of his own.

Let's also be honest that gambling would not be our first-choice vice if we were designing this fantasy-come-true from scratch. But gambling will do. It will definitely do. Bill Bennett has been exposed as a humbug artist who ought to be pelted off the public stage if he lacks the decency to slink quietly away as he is constantly calling on others to do. Although it may be impossible for anyone famous to become permanently discredited in American culture (a Bennett-like point I agree with), Bennett clearly deserves that distinction. There are those who will try to deny it to him. They will say:

1. He never specifically criticized gambling. This, if true, doesn't show that Bennett is not a hypocrite. It just shows that he's not a complete idiot. Working his way down the list of other people's pleasures, weaknesses, and uses of American freedom, he just happened to skip over his own. How convenient. Is there some reason why his general intolerance of the standard vices does not apply to this one? None that he's ever mentioned.

Open, say, Bennett's The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American Family, and read about how Americans overvalue "unrestricted personal liberty." How we must relearn to "enter judgments on a whole range of behaviors and attitudes." About how "wealth and luxury ... often make it harder to deny the quest for instant gratification" because "the more we attain, the more we want." How would you have guessed, last week, that Bennett would regard a man who routinely "cycle[s] several hundred thousand dollars in an evening" (his own description) sitting in an airless Las Vegas casino pumping coins into a slot machine or video game? Well, you would have guessed wrong! He thinks it's perfectly OK as long as you don't spend the family milk money.

2. His gambling never hurt anyone else. This is, of course, the classic libertarian standard of permissible behavior, and I think it's a good one. If a hypocrite is a person who says one thing and does another, the problem with Bennett is what he says—not (as far as we know) what he does. Bennett can't plead liberty now because opposing libertarianism is what his sundry crusades are all about. He wants to put marijuana smokers in jail. He wants to make it harder to get divorced. He wants more "moral criticism of homosexuality" and "declining to accept that what they do is right."

In all these cases, Bennett wants laws against or heightened social disapproval of activities that have no direct harmful effects on anyone except the participants. He argues that the activities in question are encouraging other, more harmful activities, or are eroding general social norms in some vague way. Empower America, one of Bennett's several shirt-pocket mass movements, officially opposes the spread of legalized gambling, and the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, one of Bennett's cleverer PR conceits, includes "problem" gambling as a negative indicator of cultural health. So, Bennett doesn't believe that gambling is harmless. He just believes that his own gambling is harmless. But by the standards he applies to everything else, it is not harmless.

Bennett has been especially critical of libertarian sentiments coming from intellectuals and the media elite. Smoking a bit of pot may not ruin their middle-class lives, but by smoking pot they create an atmosphere of toleration that can be disastrous for others who are not so well grounded. The Bill Bennett who can ooze disdain over this is the same Bill Bennett who apparently thinks he has no connection to all those "problem" gamblers because he makes millions preaching virtue and they don't.

3. He's doing no harm to himself. From the information in Alter's and Green's articles, Bennett seems to be in deep denial about this. If it's true that he's lost $8 million in gambling casinos over 10 years, that surely is addictive or compulsive behavior no matter how good virtue has been to him financially. He claims to have won more than he has lost, which is virtually (that word again!) impossible playing the machines as Bennett apparently does. If he's not in denial, then he's simply lying, which is a definite non-virtue. And he's spraying smarm like the worst kind of cornered politician—telling the Washington Post, for example, that his gambling habit started with "church bingo."

Even as an innocent hobby, playing the slots is about as far as you can get from the image Bennett paints of his notion of the Good Life. Surely even a high-roller can't "cycle through" $8 million so quickly that family, church, and community don't suffer. There are preachers who can preach an ideal they don't themselves meet and even use their own weaknesses as part of the lesson. Bill Bennett has not been such a preacher. He is smug, disdainful, intolerant. He gambled on bluster, and lost.

Michael Kinsley is Slate's founding editor.

<a href="http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread16182.shtml" target="_blank">Bill Bennett's Bad Bet: The Bookmaker of Virtues</a>
Source: Slate (US Web)
Author: Michael Kinsley
Published: Sunday, May 4, 2003
Contact: letters@slate.com
Website: <a href="http://www.slate.msn.com" target="_blank">http ://www.slate.msn.com</a>

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I hate that I share a name with that asshole...

(im not saying which name I share)

[DdC]

[jamf]

I dont think he even gives a fuck about morality and virtue. Its just an easy avenue to get rich.

[DdC]

I dont think he even gives a fuck about morality and virtue. Its just an easy avenue to get rich.

You've just described the entire Khrishun Koalition Klubs Bushit administration and all of their GOPerverted punk jive ass Liberty phobic blind followers...
Peace, Love and Liberty or the Merchants of D.E.A.th!
DdC

Won't You Come Home, Bill Bennett?

There once was a Drug Czar named Bennett
Whose every remark was a tenet
His pomposity
Plus his hypocrisy
Outweighed the United States Senate

So William Bennett is a big-time compulsive gambler who holes up at casinos for three-day binges... perfect! And his social poker game includes Judges Scalia, Bork, and the Chief Junkie, Rehnquist (who's addicted to Fentanyl but defines himself as a normie because he checks into a rehab spa every summer)! Some world-class bluffers... Newsweek and the Washington Monthly broke the Bennett story, and in case you missed it, in the last decade the former Drug Czar (under George H.W. Bush) and Secretary of Education (under Reagan) has blown at least $8 million at the tables and slot machines. Profits from "The Book of Virtues" and its many best-selling spin-offs, plus $50,000 speaking fees, enabled him to pay.

The Republican Damage Control Team is trying to put a lid on the story, employing some of the same arguments that Bennett's Drug War victims used in vain to fend off persecution. "Why is it anybody's business?" asks the effete Billy Kristol. "He did no one any harm," says Tony Blakely (himself a compulsive overeater). "He has taken personal responsibility," declares Anne Coulter (brushing back a strand of hair thinned by excessive bleaching). "It's between him and his family," says another blonde who's had some bad work done on her lips. Playing up the family angle, the RDCT told poor Mrs. Bennett to announce that she would not let Bill do any more gambling -a nice "human" touch.

Other arguments that have been splashed on the flames by these Friends of Bill: gambling isn't a sin to Catholics, gambling is legal, he didn't go into debt. It's all a misdirection play. What's reprehensible about Bill Bennett is not his gambling but his monumental hypocrisy. When someone who understands the force of compulsion tells the world that compulsion can easily overcome by will, it's a conscious lie. To imprison people behind that lie is completely immoral.

A source at a casino told Joshua Green of the Washington Monthly that Bennett tries to slink around unseen. "He'll usually call a host and let us know when he's coming. We can limo him in. He prefers the high-limit room, where he's less likely to be seen and where he can play the $500-a-pull slots. He usually plays very late at night or early in the morning -usually between midnight and 6 a.m."

The rightwing pundits imply that anybody pursuing the Bennett story lacks compassion. C'Notes says call in The Enquirer and the Globe, the investigators with serious budgets, and let's find out if the casinos sent girls up to Big Bill's room (assuming girls are his preference) along with all the food and liquor.

Bennett's role as Drug Czar is described in Smoke & Mirrors, an excellent history of the war on drugs from the '60s through the mid-'90s by Dan Baum. Bennett brought with him a squad of rightwing-ideologue assistants who'd served under him at the Dept. of Education, including his chief of staff, John Walters, our present drug czar. Bennett's crew, according to Baum, "achieved the most radical recasting of the country's 'drug problem' yet. Drugs would no longer be discussed as a health problem. If the drug issue was going to serve the Bennettistas' decade-long crusade to police the nation's character, drug abuse needed to be placed in the same category as offensive art, multicultural teaching, and ethical relativism: a matter of morality.

" 'The simple fact is that drug use is wrong,' Bennett decreed. 'And the moral argument, in the end, is the most compelling argument.'" Bennett urged prosecutors' to go after casual users whose lives were not falling apart because their example might send a confusing signal. He promoted public hospitals' drug-testing of pregnant women for drugs, which resulted in many moms losing their kids! (Poor women have to rely on public hospitals.) Bennett's biggest accomplishment as drug czar was to increase the budget 52%. After 18 months he declared victory and resigned unexpectedly. He served briefly as chairman of the Republican National Committee, but quit the $125,000/year gig when it turned out that he couldn't pocket the speaking proceeds. "I didn't take a vow of poverty," Bennett said at the time. It seemed venal and gross, but now we understand.

Rosie heard Bennett pontificating on TV recently to the effect that parents should never tell their kids that they had smoked marijuana and found it to be harmless. "He said that hypocrisy is better than honesty because it shows you have moral standards. I don't know about his Catholic schools, but in my Catholic schools we received a moral education, we read philosophers and discussed them, and were taught that you don't lie and that hypocrisy is completely immoral. Jesus said, 'You hypocrite, take the beam out of your own eye before you talk about the splinter in someone else's.'"

To the bum said the man of great virtue
I can't house or feed but I'll church you:
Gambling's like booze
If you've millions to lose
Then losing millions can't hurt you.

Date: Wed, 07 May 2003
From: "D. Paul Stanford" stanford@crrh.org
Source: Anderson Valley Advertiser (CA)
Contact: mailto: ava@pacific.net
Details: <a href="http://www.mapinc.org/media/2667" target="_blank">http ://www.mapinc.org/media/2667</A>
Author: Fred Gardner
Bookmark: <a href="http://www.mapinc.org/find?115>http://www.mapinc.org/find?115" target="_blank">http ://www.mapinc.org/find?115>http://www.mapinc.org/find?115</A>
(Cannabis - California)

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