Earlier liberal blogger Josh Marshall was touting the "unpleasant information" about to exposed about a "leading conservative moralist." I guess this is it. Bennett has to know that speaking out about morals is going to make him a target for the left-wing hypocrisy police. Apparently his fondness for casinos was fairly well known in Washington. Bill never complained about gambling, so this shouldn't hurt him too bad. Michael Jordan loses more on a single golf shot. I'm sure there are alot of disappointed Democrats wishing he got caught with a naked Girl Scout.
This is the politics of personal destruction so loved by Hillary and her gang of thugs. I suppose they think it was important. He spends his own money gambling. I guess they think he will look as bad as a reverend who bangs women in every city and has a least one child by a mistress of whom we know.
You know...I wonder why on earth the casino's would leak this sort of documentation. Aren't they known for being discrete in these matters? Sounds like they had a sure thing going with some very good patrons that might make some of them think before spending on that scale...in Vegas any way...
Michael Kinsley has a piece on Bennett in Slate, which I think is funny and right on the mark.
He explains why Bennett's defenders are wrong - after reading a few hundred of them, I think Kinsley's right.
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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."
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http://slate.msn.com/id/2082526/I think the original Newsweek article is semi-manufactured. That's my opinion. Ever work in/with a casino? People that they scout for gambling purposes – and that’s what they do when they send planes and limos to pick you up and comp everything (and give you large revolving accounts) – are not reported on.
There are things that they have to report. None of them will be made available to you or me - or Newsweek. Somebody stepped in sh!t when they released this info. Bennett sends in his lawyers and they’ll settle this in 30 minutes and everything will be denied. He’ll recover any losses over the last two decades in the process. The casinos will do this voluntarily and enthusiastically, BTW.