Posted on 05/13/2003 8:08:49 PM PDT by TLBSHOW
Do Right-Wingers Ever Defend Their Own?
Did I miss the memo again? I am mystified by right-wing pundits’ reactions to the attempted lynching of Bill Bennett. Do these people ever defend their own? Ever? A few months back, right-wing pundits at National Review and The Weekly Standard began to pressure Trent Lott into resigning as Senate Majority Leader because he told an “offensive” joke at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party. Almost no conservative journalists—save the excommunicated Pat Buchanan and Bob Novak—defended Lott from unfair, outrageous, and unproven charges of racism. Rather, they piled on and locked arms with Jesse Jackson, Maxine Waters, and Tom Daschle to oust Lott.
And now we have the case of Bill Bennett. In a hit piece that might well have been titled “We Really, Really Hate Bill Bennett,” Jonathan Alter and Joshua Green reported that Bennett has—GASP!—gambled. Apparently, we are supposed to extrapolate from this revelation that Bennett no longer has the moral authority to urge people to refrain from freebasing cocaine.
Alter and Green despise public virtue. They do not like judgments of bad behavior, so they attack Bennett in the hopes of discrediting him personally. The journalistic standards at Newsweek are best exemplified by the inclusion of this quote in the article:
“There’s a term in the trade for his kind of gambler,” says a casino source who has witnessed Bennett at the high-limit slots in the wee hours. “We call them losers.”
Read those lines several times and let them sink in. They are quoting an anonymous casino source that calls Bennett a “loser.” Is this a fifth grade rank-out session or Newsweek? How can there be any doubt that this article was anything but a hit piece?
Even though Bennett has spoken publicly about his love for the casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, Alter and Green insinuate that Bennett had something to hide:
”And Bennett must have worried about news of his habit leaking out. His customer profile at one casino lists an address that corresponds to Empower.org, the Web site of Empower America, the group Bennett cochairs. But typed across the form are the words: NO CONTACT AT RES OR BIZ!!!”
Holy cow!!! Alter and Green found the smoking gun—Bennett didn’t want solicitations!!! There is a term in the trade for these kinds of journalists. We call them losers.
Bill Bennett did not do anything illegal. By the standards of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, he did nothing immoral. He was not hypocritical—he was quite open about his gambling and never suggested that reasonable gambling was immoral.
This is really quite simple: The Left is trying to rid the public square of all individuals who speak of morality. Altar and Green want the Bennett story to serve as notice to future moral crusaders: If you make judgments about behaviors or suggest that there are problems with the culture, we will dig through your garbage and expose any imperfections for all the world to see. We will embarrass and humiliate you. And even if you have not been hypocritical, we will smear you anyway because we will create “the appearance of hypocrisy.”
These people want to make Bill Bennett into a national joke—a punchline. Now more than ever, Bennett deserves the full backing of conservatives. This is a critical battle of the culture war. The Left is trying to turn Bill Bennett into Jimmy Swaggart and conservatives have an obligation to defend him.
But yet again, the latest generation of mealy-mouthed right-wing pundits has been withholding full support. On This Week, George Will argued that Bennett’s sin was immoderation. On Fox News, Fred Barnes and Brit Hume said that Bennett’s actions were hypocritical and constitute a public relations nightmare. Cal Thomas said that scrutiny into Bennett’s life is warranted given his crusade for morality in the public sphere.
Andrew Sullivan was invited on CNN’s Reliable Sources to defend Bennett. His defense was unusual: He blamed the Christian Right for its intrusion into peoples’ private lives and claimed that Bennett had not written his own books. Sullivan concluded by saying that he wasn’t particularly happy to have to defend Bennett.
The National Review made some tame points about hypocrisy not being too bad a thing. They also ran a guest column from a libertarian who hates public discussions of morality and wants to legalize LSD. That’s about as strong a defense as you get from NR these days.
The only mistake Bill Bennett has made is to publicly declare that he will quit gambling. Obviously he decided to quit because he had embarrassed some of his Christian colleagues from denominations that view gambling as immoral. These are the same colleagues that included gambling among a long list of characteristics used to define Empower America’s Index of Leading Culture Indicators. Bennett’s deference toward his colleagues is a nice touch, but it has had the same effect as Trent Lott going on BET—the appearance of public capitulation.
Perhaps Bennett would have had a stronger backbone had some of his conservative friends had the moral fortitude to defend him publicly. Where is the loyalty? I guess it’s true—to paraphrase Harry Truman, if you’re in the conservative movement nowadays and you want a friend, get a dog.
Leftist elites are still trying to bring everyone down to Clinton's level.
We defend principles, not people.
What's that old saw? "Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds discuss ideas"?
Defending our own is a must. Santorum and Bennett deserved better. Although I do believe the "general public" overrlooks the RATs rants (they consider the source). Thanks for the ping.
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