Shooting craps with virtue:

Last week it was revealed that William Bennett, pompous bloviating virtue lobbyist and a perennial conservative welfare recipient, had a serious gambling addiction to the tune of losses in the eight million dollar range.
His apologists (and they are legion) bleat that "he did nothing wrong"...and indeed legally this is true.
Bennett certainly managed to wager on a spectacular series of wrong horses, numbers, and slot machines down through the years...keep that in mind.
I'd always wondered what impelled Bill to start up these endless non-profit pressure groups in DC? Now it all seems obvious, he needs the paycheck!
Bill and I go way back, I remember with the simplest nostalgia his stint as Ronald Reagan's Education Secretary. I was in college back then, and rooming in a gothic attic off campus...$35.00 a week-oh nostalgia!
In those days the Reagan Cabinet was the cushiest gig in America. In exchange for a willingness to implement huge budget cuts one could safely drowse away a lengthy appointment in safety. Bennett though, felt honor bound to minimize the impact of his budget cuts by snidely asserting that a certain amount of "divestiture" on the part of students receiving assistance would necessary. "Stereo divestiture, automobile divestiture....vacation in Fort Lauderdale divestiture" were the examples the mighty pedagogue offered up.
The implication was, in Reagan's America ungrateful college students would have to curb their appetite for luxury items.
I never forgot that bit of graceless gratuitous snarkiness, and ever after Bill has been the poster boy for a new class of conservative, scholar-polemicist-politicians who are frantically enriching themselves at the expense of the survival of democracy in America.
Rampant personalities are entirely welcome in this new overclass, as long as they know how to spin personal embarrassment with skill.
And what the hell, Bennett has enough in his poke to blow away eight million on the slots..so clearly this new class thing has it's compensations
His wife now assures us, Bill's gambling days are over...one has happy images of a 1940's housewife scowling and tapping a rolling pin into her palm.
But ah the hallmark of this new class is their utter shamelessness, so no doubt Karl Rove or Grover Norquist wrote her a good talking points memo prior to her press release.
Cause' eight million buys a lot of rolling pins boys.
Sick
Demented
Typical....