Crazy like Fox: With the announcement that it has replaced pundit-troll Robert Novak with super-moralist Bill Bennet, CNN is continuing its slouch toward Wingnutland. The radio talk-show host and former Reagan and Bush One administration flunky is the latest conservative pundit hired by CNN, following its recent signing of radio talk-show host Glenn Beck.
The press release contained an strange sentence:
Bennett will be one of CNN’s political commentators as part of the network’s continuing effort to bring a broad range of perspectives to its viewers.
The only perspective Bennett brings is Bennett’s, unfortnately. In the June 2003 issue of Washington Monthly, Joshua Green’s article, “Bookie of Virtue,” painted a portrait of Bennett as an Old Testament preacher of morality and dictator of mores, and a bit of flame at the slots:
For more than 20 years, as a writer, speaker, government official, and political operative, Bennett has been a commanding general in the culture wars. As Ronald Reagan’s chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, he was the scourge of academic permissiveness. Later, as Reagan’s secretary of education, he excoriated schools and students for failing to set and meet high standards. As drug czar under George H.W. Bush, he applied a get-tough approach to drug use, arguing that individuals have a moral responsibility to own up to their addiction.
But while bashing wife-swapping and the “Rikki Lake Show,” Bennett was conspicuously quiet on the topic of gambling, for good reason, according to Green:
Bennett has been a high-roller since at least the early 1990s. A review of one 18-month stretch of gambling showed him visiting casinos, often for two or three days at a time (and enjoying a line of credit of at least $200,000 at several of them). Bennett likes to be discreet. “He’ll usually call a host and let us know when he’s coming,” says one source. “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 documents show that in one two-month period, Bennett wired more than $1.4 million to cover losses.
Bennett claims his style of gambling is “moral”:
“I play fairly high stakes. I adhere to the law. I don’t play the ‘milk money.’ I don’t put my family at risk, and I don’t owe anyone anything.”
Well, that’s a comfort, and something viewers should keep in mind as Bennett carries on about how the rest of us should behave and whose values we should emulate. Seems to me that CNN is taking a big gamble, not only on Bennett and Glenn and the new rightism of its broadcasts, but that its viewers want more Fox and less balance in their TV punditry.
Funny, Bennett sounds just like a coworker I had a long conversation with last night about his gambling addiction. He too had a long list of distinctions between himself and people who have a “problem” with gambling. It all sounded like horseshit to me: “I don’t scratch off my tickets in the parking lot of the convenience store because if you do it there, you end up going back inside to buy more…My girlfriend objects to how much I spend on gambling because she wants to me spend all my money on her…etc, etc.,” along with endless strategies for how to do Vegas, horses, greyhounds, jai lai, slots, craps, and the Super Bowl better than all those other poor schmucks out there who REALLY have a problem. He also explained which money it was O.K. to bet and which money not to. He and Bennett would really hit it off.