Bill Bennett

[Darryl G. Thomas]

Scott,

You've got this guy making a fortune on virtue and it turns out he's a hyprocrite, just like Bakker and Swaggert when they got busted. This ain't about conservative bashing this is about hypocracy which neither political orientation owns the market on.

And "there you go again" about Clinton. If Clinton had been going around making speech after speech, writing book after book about the sanctity of marriage and monogamy then you'd have an argument.

[Scott Dolan]

You nasty libs will never defile my beautiful baby,

[walto]

There were a bunch of so-called liberals (myself included) who happily labeled Clinton a big fat liar/perjurer and a serial adulterer. IMO, it wasn't OK for him to lie, or redefine "is" and it never was OK. He used half the resources of the national government to get him out the mess he made for himself because of his complete lack of self-control. He deserved to get his ticket to practice law pulled.

Now, let's see you and Monte do the same here for Bennett, and cut out the self-serving generalizing bullshit.

Bennett is nothing but a supercilious, holier-than-thou, know-it-all gasbag pig, and never has been anything else.

[Tanager]

Scott, you and I must listen to different voices - I heard *plenty* of peeps calling for Clinton's ouster, and hell, the man got impeached. And how does that justify (and what does it have to do with) what Bennett does/says? I don't think it does, personally.

C'mon - it's disingenous to say, "we're criticizing him, we're libs, what we say is therefore to be disregarded." You have said several times that one of the reasons you think the way you do now is that morality and standards matter to you now that you have a kid - so Bennett's doublespeak (and don't compare mine to his - I'm not held up by anyone as a moral compass, least of all myself) doesn't matter to you, not even a little? This is the guy who rails at the schools and parents and Hollywood about setting values for the kids, remember?

[Darryl G. Thomas]

Too skinny. She could be a falming bleeding heart and still be too skinny.

Is she related to the Hilton Sisters?

Was it Ann or her twin Laura Ingrahim who wrote an article awhile back complaining about the dating scene in DC?

Anyway, some guy worte in response abiut her putting on a few pounds.

Baby must have back!

[Scott Dolan]

Hey Daryl, I'm not saying the guy isn't a hypocrite, because without question he is. Oh, and don't forget to catch 60 Minutes when Billy and Dole go at it over family values. Gee, maybe then I'll have an argument.

Walto, although I don't consider gambling to be immoral, I will say that Bennett has caught himself in his own trap, no doubt. Hell, if you can't practice what you preach, you are a fraud, plain and simple. Conservative or liberal.


Uh-oh........I'm feeling kinda woozy.............................something.....coming over....................me...................................................

[Tanager]

Give in to that woozy feeling, Scott - you'll feel better.

[Darryl G. Thomas]

Let's see, Clinton was "a tough dog to keep on the porch" and Dole dumped the wife who nursed him from his WWII wounds to trade up for a younger babe (Elizabeth Dole).

Yeah, Scott I see your point.

[Clay Fink]

Originally posted by Darryl G. Thomas
Too skinny. She could be a falming bleeding heart and still be too skinny. ...

Baby must have back!

Monica! Now that's a sexy woman!!! The bigger the cushon the sweeter the pushin'.

Oh baby!!!

[Scott Dolan]

Hey Daryl, did you hear me defending Dole? Besides, my dad dumped my mom after 21 years of marriage, although it was because she was a prescription med freak psycho, and he's a somewhat self righteous christian himself. I always got a kick out of the fact that the only people to ever come down on my wife and I when we were 'living in sin' was her grandmother, owner of a christian bookstore who cheated on her husband several times and was divorced because of it; My wifes mother, who was an alcoholic that not only cheated on her husband, but threw all of his shit in the yard while here new boyfriend was moving in; and of course my father. All christians mind you. Hmmmmmmmm...........I'm noticing a trend here.............

And since you brought up the Hilton sisters, I think it's high time to ask the most pressing question here. Who the hell are the Hilton sisters??!! I saw them advertised for some show the other night like they were really important folks or something. And I have to be perfectly honest and say, I have no idea who they even are. I'm so out of touch.........

Clay, you can have that pig Lewinsky. Although I will say that at least her Hollywood makeover did her SOME good........but she's got nothing on my little Annie.

[Ron Thorne]

Everything's pretty much been said with respect to the subject-at-hand, but I'll feel a little better after I state the following opinion.

I had the unfortunate opportunity to see and hear him in a debate on the campus of one of our son's universities about ten years ago.

William Bennett is an arrogant, self-important, know-it-all, cocky, smarmy, hypocritical legend-in-his-own-mind.

Thank you.

[Clay Fink]

Originally posted by Scott Dolan
Clay, you can have that pig Lewinsky.

Thanks!!!

[Darryl G. Thomas]

I was just riffing on Dole, Clinton and family values.

Nikki and Paris Hilton are heirs to the Hilton Hotel fortune. They're celebrities because of being rich, blonde, skinny and partying all over the world. They show up on E! TV and Entertainment Tonight a lot. They're the "It" girls of the jet set!!!

[Tanager]

This is a subject for much fruitful discussion entirely unrelated to Bennett...

But what the fuck is up with the skinny heroin-addict fetish? I thought we'd ditched that, but no, it seems we're still obsessed with women who look like bulemics. Yuck.

[Clay Fink]

Originally posted by Tanager
This is a subject for much fruitful discussion entirely unrelated to Bennett...

But what the fuck is up with the skinny heroin-addict fetish? I thought we'd ditched that, but no, it seems we're still obsessed with women who look like bulemics. Yuck.

It's actually an obsession with women who are built like pre-pubecesent boys. Why conservatives have taken to the boyish Coulter, I have no idea. I can only guess.

[Steve Reynolds]

I'm with Darryl

she got not curves and she got nuthin' to hold on to

[Darryl G. Thomas]

I was watching "Zoolander" last night. Paris Hilton had a cameo in it.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Suppose this whole gambling thing is part of a cleverly conceived promotional campaign for his new book, "The Book Of NEW Virtues for a New World Order," which includes smugness, hypocrisy, and rotating lines of credit among its "new" virtues? Then we're just playing right into his hands here, and he'll come out smelling like a rose.

[Chris A]

From tomorrow's New York Times

FRANK RICH
Tupac's Revenge on Bennett

• It is almost too perfect that Las Vegas, the city where Tupac Shakur was murdered in 1996, would be the undoing of William Bennett.
  
  In 1995, Mr. Bennett, serving as America's self-appointed cultural commissar, made a target of Tupac, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and other practitioners of gangsta rap. They were public enemy No.1 In his relentless battle against what he was fond of calling "the filth, sewage and mindless bloodletting of the popular entertainment industry." Mr. Bennett was above such vulgarity. He had been secretary of education. He had attacked the National Endowment for the Arts for perpetrating junk. He had anthologized Plato and Aesop in "The Book of Virtues."
  
  But the guy just couldn't keep away from Vegas. It was there and in Atlantic City that he plied the gambling habit that has made him comic relief for a grateful nation in the two weeks since The Washington Monthly and Newsweek first exposed his $8 million, decade-long history of losses. Many of the gags, though, miss the point. Mr. Bennett's embarrassment is seen by late-night comics and Washington alike as a strictly personal humiliation Mr. Virtue, in a farcical belly flop out of "Tartuffe," is caught sinning. But for those of us who think gambling isn't a sin so much as a potential illness, there is a different and even greater payoff in Mr. Bennett's downfall. The puncturing of his dishonest public persona is a huge nail in the coffin of the disgraceful national culture wars in which be served as a particularly vicious commanding general during the 1980's and 1990's.
  
  Ah, Vegas! I love the place, but why would Mr. Bennett seek it out? Casino gambling is legal in 28, states, many of which are far closer to his Maryland home; he could play his beloved slots as nearby as Delaware. Maybe he was drawn by the same attributes that appeal to many Americans: big drinks big shows, big breasts. Maybe he liked the fact that Vegas, after a brief effort to offer family-friendly attractions in the early 90's, had reverted to its Rat Pack roots. As The Los Angeles Times declared two, years ago, the sin is back in Sin City with an explosion of sex shows on and beyond the Strip.
  
  Mr. Bennett's compulsive, prolonged visits to a town that exuberantly epitomizes everything he was against in American culture is the hypocrisy that truly resonates--far more so than the gambling itself. If his slots habit has wreaked havoc on his family and back account, that's his own private business. But the hypocrisy he has long practiced as a cultural warrior inflicted damage far beyond his immediate household.
  
  Mr. Bennett was recognizable as a phony (at least to anyone outside the Beltway) long before he was captured on video at a casino. He was always out to score a jackpot for himself first -- and let culture take the hindmost. Even as he lambasted Time War-ner for trafficking in gangsta rap and told a fellow anti-rap crusader (Bob Dole) to return some of his Time Warner campaign contributions, he took money from one of that company's divisions, the Book of the Month Club. When caught by The Washington Post in this apparent philosophical conflict in 1995, he defended it by saying that the club "doesn't give me that much money" (the sum was a mere bagatelle to him--only six figures). At the height of the mid-90's Republican revolu-tion, he joined Newt Gingrich in the. campaign to vilify public television--and then sold his own "Children's Book of Virtues" PBS as an ani-mated TV series. To answer charges of hypocrisy on that occasion, he said that only private money would be used to produce the program, conve-niently ignoring the fact that public money is essential to support the stations that would broadcast his cartoons.
  
  In the aftermath of the Columbine. shootings of 1999, Mr. Bennett went on a rampage against Hollywood He testified before Congress about "the Edgar Bronfmans, Howard String-ers, Michael Eisners and Oliver Stones" who spew cultural "rot" Somehow he forgot to name the name of Rupert Murdoch, a benefac-tor of conservative causes like his. own. Mr. Murdoch's Fox was then preparing to market the ultraviolent film "The Fight Club."
  
  If Mr. Bennett's gambling has been, as he and his fans maintain, a victimless pastime, his career as both a public figure and government official has been anything but. To see how Mr. Bennett has victimized the public at large, the most instructive example is his shell game with the National Endowment for the Human-ities. In the 1970's, he secured a $970,000 grant from its coffers for the National Humanities Center Id North Carolina, of which he was then direc-tor. In the Reagan administration, he became. the endowment's chairman. During the 90's, without missing a beat, he called for the endowment's abolition. Like public television, the humanities endowment helps, how-ever imperfectly, to foster a culture to counter the violent movies and trashy afternoon talk shows Mr. Ben-nett purports to deplore. The agency gives money to projects like Ken Burns's "The Civil War" and the preservation of presidential papers. Mr. Bennett's campaign succeeded. in knocking down its already tiny budget by a third.
  
  The motives for his culture war battles, besides self-aggrandizement and buckraking on the speaking circuit, have always been political. He changed his mind about the human-ities endowment not because it had changed but as a way of attacking the Democrats who were then in power. Nor was he above exploiting racial fears, Willie Horton-style, when such pandering suited his ideo-logical agenda. As Barry Glassner pointed out in his 1999 book "The Culture of Fear," Mr. Bennett's crusade against violent lyrics focused on black artists. "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die," sang Johnny Cash in "Folsoni Prison Blues," to cite just one song on the classic coun-try playlist that somehow escaped Mr. Bennett's condemnation. (May-be Reno gets the same free pass Vegas does.)
  
  As an unofficial adjunct to his anti-rap activities, Mr. Bennett was also an author of a book, "Body Count," concocted to frighten Americans into believing that the lyrics' violent im-agery would be carried out wholesale in real life: "America's beleaguered cities are about to be victimized by a paradigm-shattering wave of ultraviolent, morally vacuous young people some call the 'superpredators.' " But as Mr. Glassner noted, urban youth violence in fact continued to decline after this apocalyptic jeremiad.
  
  It's not clear that Mr. Bennett ever really cared about culture, scholarship or any of the other ideals he pretended to be defending against the onslaught of the heathen hordes. Ac-cording to a gambling expert con-sulted by The Daily News, it would have taken him 800 to 1,600 hours of continuous play to hemorrhage the $8 million we know about so far. That doesn't allow much time for intellec-tual endeavor. His own best-selling books did not involve much writing or thinking; they were often gim-micky repackagings of material by better authors in the public domain.
  
  And Mr Bennett was hardly a scrupulous academic. In 1997, he wrote in The Weekly Standard that "the best available research sug-gests that the average life span of male homosexuals is around 43 years of age." The best available research has never suggested anything of the kind. Once again, a political agenda came first: his screed was arguing that Bill Clinton, who had "repeatedly spoken out against smoking because of the early death associated with that act," should do the same about homosexuality. The sub rosa agenda was to stoke hysteria about gay men with AIDS much as he had about "superpredatory" urban blacks.
  
  In his culture wars, Mr. Bennett didn't care whom he hurt. He always said he was championing the values of "mainstream America" over "elites," but clearly he doesn't care for "mainstream America" much more than he does for rappers and gays. The Bellagio, where he lost $500,000 in a weekend, is the most elite of Vegas hotels. As one frequent guest told me, "He wouldn't find many of his seething Clinton-hating constituents there." Mr. Bennett does, however, stick taxpayers with some of his Vegas bills, since the perks he has received as a high roller (lush suites, limos, free booze and who knows what else) are legitimate business-expense deductions for the, casinos, which can lighten their tax load accordingly.
  
  "If Tupac were alive, he'd be laughing," said Jimmy Iovine, chair-man of Interscope, when I called him last week. It's his label that was in Mr. Bennett's crosshairs in the 1990's. Dr. Dre, Mr. Iovine says, "Was crying" with laughter after being told of Mr. Bennett's gambling embarrassment. Mr. Iovine, too, can I laugh--all the way to the bank. When Mr. Bennett's campaign persuaded Time Warner to sell its half interest in Interscope back to Mr. Iovine in 1995, he promptly pocketed a $100 million profit by turning around and selling that half of his company to MCA for twice as much. "I owe this guy," he says of Mr. Bennett. "And now they're teaching Tupac in high schools to interest kids in reading."
  
  To say that Mr. Bennett lost all his culture wars as decisively as he lost his $8 million would not be an over-statement. Hip-hop is the dominant youth culture of the land, and a num-ber of its top acts, including Eminem and 50 Cent, are at Interscope. The entertainment companies Mr. Bennett testified against in Congress are bigger than ever. The federal humanities and arts endowments he helped maim are being supported not undermined, by the Bush administration. Rick Santorum, spewing Bennettesque ignorance about gay people, seems to have disappeared into the Dr. Laura witness protection program. Larry David, whom Mr. Bennett attacked for a supposed "Christian-bashing" joke in 2000, is a smash hit on HBO. Mr. Bennett's afternoon talk-show nemesis, Jerry Springer, is not only still on the air but is contemplating running for the Senate. Should Mr. Bennett re-emerge in public to campaign against him, Mr. Springer just might win.

[frankpop1]

tupac - tupac shakur
smoked two pac a day
that's why they called him tupac

i think bill will burn in hell

[walto]

I wish Rich could pound that final nail with this article, but I fear Bennett's next book (probably something like "Coming to Terms with Humility: What I have learned...the hard way") will sell even more than his previous crap. His readership probably doesn't interesect much with readers of the NY Times.

Bennett's a pig, and, IMHO, and notwithstanding Rich's desire to distinguish his piece from those who have attacked Bennett on TV and elsewhere, pretty much all of his detractors are saying the same thing. Hypocrisy, hubris, arrogance. It's all pigishness, and that's all it's been for many many years.

[frankpop1]

so let's get this straight walter, bennet is or isnt a pig?

dolan pontificates:

Whats the difference in morality, right vs. wrong, and so forth?" Most everyone tailors their own personal realities anyway. Is there really absolute truth? Everyone's own belief system is completely and totally customized and personal.

NOT ACCORDING TO BILL BENNETT. NOW HOW DO YOU THINK BENNETT WOULD HAVE RESPONDED IF CLINTON HAD GAMBLED A 100000 DOLLARS IN HIS PRESIDENCY??


"A great example of this would be to read the bible and then talk to your everyday 'Christian'. " oh my god dolan. shut up.

Clinton blew a wad on Monica's dress and then lied about it on national tv was 'everybody does it', or 'you would have lied too'.

i say, 'NICE SHOT!" Actually i heard he was aiminng for you, dolan. you cant justify everything on clinton, dolan. but see clinton is not a penultimate hypocrit. bennett is.



monte thunders:

"The exception to this is Bennett's attack on de facto moral example of POTUS Clinton, about whom Bennett ...asked Where's the Outrage?. Well, the outrage is easy to find when there is the chance to call a Republican a hypocrite! "



i always wondered about that quote. they tried to impeach clinton and that seems like outrage. the problem was almost +70 percent disagreed. that's a huge number of republicans against bennett here.

as far as outrage on bennett, does america even care. bennett set himself up to be knocked down. i dont think bennett represents most republicans anyway. it's not even his republicanism that matters. he's just fodder for fun.

and is that what 'a family man' does, hang in the casinos spending millions.... sheesh

[walto]

"so let's get this straight walter, bennet is or isnt a pig?"



Is is is.