A morals czar's vice and the death of privacy

Boston Globe ^ | 5/12/03 | Cathy Young

[RJCogburn]

''THE BOOKIE of Virtue.'' ''The Man of Virtues Has a Vice.'' One could almost visualize the gleeful rubbing of hands in response to the revelation that conservative activist, moralist, and best-selling author William Bennett is a heavy gambler, a ''preferred customer'' in several Las Vegas and Atlantic City casinos. Bennett, a former secretary of education and former ''drug czar,'' has also been something of a self-appointed ''morals czar'' to the nation, celebrating old-fashioned virtues and castigating America's moral decline in his books, ''The Book of Virtues,'' ''The Moral Compass,'' and The Death of Outrage.'' To Bennett's liberal critics, he is the latest example of a self-righteous moralizer exposed as a hypocrite. To his conservative defenders, the liberals are the real hypocrites, claiming to champion privacy while joining a witch-hunt against Bennett for his private behavior.

[RJCogburn]

Appropriately tough on Bennett, but waaaaaaay too easy on Clinton, IMO.

[angkor]

Where is the Boston Globe story explaining how a decade of gambling records from multiple casinos found its way into the hands of the Washington Monthly?

[isthisnickcool]

Bennett, a former secretary of education and former ''drug czar,'' has also been something of a self-appointed ''morals czar'' to the nation, celebrating old-fashioned virtues and castigating America's moral decline in his books......

The key word is "self-appointed". Bennett was not elected or appointed to anything. In a way, he made up his own little business and people bought in to it. Bennett has not had nor does he have any power to make anyone do anything. He is not a preacher, a priest, a politician or policeman.

Bennett's basic message has been "be good" as best I can tell. A message I never needed to hear. So it does not matter to me if his message stops, stays or strays......

[PMCarey]

Oh please. One need only look at Bennett's girth over the last few years to realize that there is at least one of the 7 deadly's that he has fallen prey to. What's the difference between the sin of gluttony and the sin of gambling?

[HiTech RedNeck]

Food is cheaper.

[KDD]

gambling records from multiple casinos

Perhaps the "Casino records" are actually credit card billing statements. Someone...maybe his wife, could have leaked those. I do not believe any Casino in Vegas would be so indiscrete. A wife po'd about rising gambling debts and unable to get hubby to stop might leak such billing statements to bring public pressure on hubby. If so, it worked.

Bennett's vicious stint 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-ideologues 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, supposedly an educator, purveyed intellectually dishonest circular reasoning: drug use is immoral because drugs are illegal, and drugs are illegal because they're immoral. He urged prosecutors' to go after casual users whose lives were manageable because their example might send a confusing signal to their friends, neighbors, and children. He promoted public hospitals' drug-testing of pregnant women, which resulted in many a poor mom losing their kids! ( Only 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.

Bennett pontificated on TV 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.

[Wilhelm Tell]

No one, as far as I know, has ever gotten diabetes, heart disease, or cancer from handling poker chips and cards. Which is more sinful? A poker chip or a potato chip? The Church-of-Do-as-I-Say,-not-as-I-Do is ever-popular. On the other hand, the same people who are in rabid attack mode about Wm. Bennett are strangely quiet about the more severe problems of Clinton, Ted Kennedy, etc.

[fporretto]

He said that hypocrisy is better than honesty because it shows you have moral standards.

There is a kernel of hard truth in this. Hypocrisy, as we have been told, is the homage vice pays to virtue. It protects valuable social norms from widespread attack on the basis of the occasional misdeeds of a few. Just because all flesh is weak doesn't mean it ought not to strive to be stronger.

Though I disagree with Bennett's political positions in several large ways, I sympathize with him for the flaying he's received over a private practice he's never tried to conceal. Only a man who is explicitly and unabashedly without moral constraints of any kind -- a complete sociopath -- is never "hypocritical." We are all sinners.

For a larger disquisition, please see:

The Decent Thing

Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason:
http://palaceofreason.com

[steve8714]

Bennett looks like TKennedy 20 years ago, but without the murder stench. Frankly, he is a multi millionaire, and if he didn't waste his money gambling he would probably waste it some other way. And were we all not entertained when James Bond won or lost thousand of pounds on a single card in the most senseless game of chance, Baccarat?

[KDD]

The State only serves to undermine the moral authority of the one institution actually charged with teaching or defining the tenets of self disipline and moral clarity...the Church.

And the Church has been complicit in this usurption of power by the State for the most part. While the Church can use spiritual suasion and social exclusion to modify behavior regarding vice, the main weapon of the State is force, the very thing the Church's teaching rejects. Once people accept that the State is the only source with the legitimate authority to dictate norms of social behavior in areas of private affairs then we will have slipped straight into the tyranny of the majority.

The institution that conservatives most need to conserve are our institutions of religion. But it's so far the other way this country's gone. Don't smoke pot but murder the baby in your womb...Thats the morality of the STATE.

And you are a fine writer.

[aristeides]

FRANCOIS DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD French philanthropist and social reformer (1613 - 1680), Maximes 218: L'hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend a la vertu.

[aristeides]

Where is the Boston Globe story explaining how a decade of gambling records from multiple casinos found its way into the hands of the Washington Monthly?

Just what I was wondering. Something gotten from Terry Lenzner's secret police that the RATs were holding in reserve?

[KDD]

The problem is that concrete moral issues have been preempted by the liberal presumption of privacy, and the relentless extension of the liberal language of autonomy has removed a common moral framework from our society. Somewhere we have lost our hold on the sense that there is a moral order independent of our choices and wishes.

We can point to many suspects in history as the causes of this loss, but only their common character really matters. It is the fate of a liberal political tradition to progressively consume its own moral substance. By removing more and more of the controverted issues from the public sphere and placing them in the private realm, it conveys the inexorable sense that there is no common moral order. There are only the "values" we choose to apply to ourselves. All that matters is that we are legally right in asserting our rights claims, and the legal order is finally accepted as the only moral order. The independent moral order has not been abolished, of course. The fact that pornographers pose as (moral) champions of the First Amendment may be the clearest evidence that we still have in our civil society some sense of morality, and within that inchoate germ of self-realization lies the best hope for a moral reawakening. The inescapability of an order of good and evil, which is not ours to command but by which we will eventually be measured, is a steady pressure on our individual consciences, and it is made manifest by the elaborateness of attempts to deny it. snip Wherever the exercise of self-restraint begins, it has the inestimable value of forcing the recognition that we live within an order of limits. Our rights are not a poisonous brew destined to subvert any sense of difference between good and evil. We may not be able to define to our satisfaction where the line is to be drawn. But we can discern clearly its outer limits. The unambiguous recognition of such boundaries is an indispensable element in preserving the awareness of a moral order beyond our construction. Without that awareness we would eventually cease to regard respect for an order of mutual rights as itself something right. An order of rights without right is simply that. Only if we recognize this do we have any chance of retaining contact with an order of right beyond rights. What we have a right to do may not in fact be right to do. The difference is crucial and it must be embedded in the law itself, because only then can we prevent the collapse of the morally right into the legally right. Acknowledging the limits of the law is indispensable to preserving the recognition of a moral order beyond it. Conversely, relieving legality of the burden of moral rightness is also indispensable to its preservation. The legal and the moral must remain distinct if they are to perform their roles of supporting and facilitating one another http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a39f7ad0d0b86.htm

[KDD]

The problem is that concrete moral issues have been preempted by the liberal presumption of privacy, and the relentless extension of the liberal language of autonomy has removed a common moral framework from our society. Somewhere we have lost our hold on the sense that there is a moral order independent of our choices and wishes.

We can point to many suspects in history as the causes of this loss, but only their common character really matters. It is the fate of a liberal political tradition to progressively consume its own moral substance. By removing more and more of the controverted issues from the public sphere and placing them in the private realm, it conveys the inexorable sense that there is no common moral order. There are only the "values" we choose to apply to ourselves. All that matters is that we are legally right in asserting our rights claims, and the legal order is finally accepted as the only moral order.

The independent moral order has not been abolished, of course. The fact that pornographers pose as (moral) champions of the First Amendment may be the clearest evidence that we still have in our civil society some sense of morality, and within that inchoate germ of self-realization lies the best hope for a moral reawakening. The inescapability of an order of good and evil, which is not ours to command but by which we will eventually be measured, is a steady pressure on our individual consciences, and it is made manifest by the elaborateness of attempts to deny it.

snip

Wherever the exercise of self-restraint begins, it has the inestimable value of forcing the recognition that we live within an order of limits. Our rights are not a poisonous brew destined to subvert any sense of difference between good and evil. We may not be able to define to our satisfaction where the line is to be drawn. But we can discern clearly its outer limits. The unambiguous recognition of such boundaries is an indispensable element in preserving the awareness of a moral order beyond our construction. Without that awareness we would eventually cease to regard respect for an order of mutual rights as itself something right.

An order of rights without right is simply that. Only if we recognize this do we have any chance of retaining contact with an order of right beyond rights. What we have a right to do may not in fact be right to do. The difference is crucial and it must be embedded in the law itself, because only then can we prevent the collapse of the morally right into the legally right. Acknowledging the limits of the law is indispensable to preserving the recognition of a moral order beyond it. Conversely, relieving legality of the burden of moral rightness is also indispensable to its preservation. The legal and the moral must remain distinct if they are to perform their roles of supporting and facilitating one another

http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a39f7ad0d0b86.htm

[angkor]

Perhaps the "Casino records" are actually credit card billing statements.

The lines of credit extended to Bennett wouldn't have been through credit cards. Nor would they have detailed his preference to gamble in the high-roller rooms, his liking for video poker, etc.

No, these are records obtained directly from the casinos over a long period of time.

In fact I don't recall seeing anything so detailed and comprehensive being released on anyone, ever, be it a pol, a celebrity, an Asian tycoon, or a business executive.

You might read about some single weekend spree in the Enquirer from time to time, but this is really unprecedented in its scope and detail.