Posted 7:38 AM by Scoobie Davis

The Last Word on William Bennett
I have been busy standing back and enjoying this. Sometimes karma is slow. As a believer in karma and reincarnation, I believe that those behind the 2000 coup will be punished in the next life (though I pray every day that the punishment occurs in this life). However, with Bennett, it’s great to see instant karma in action. It would have been bad karma to laugh if Bennett contracted Lou Gehrig's Disease; however, it is appopriate to chortle upon learning that the pompous blowhard has Art Schlichter's Disease. Despite the columns in the National Review defending Bennett immediately after the Washington Monthly article, William F. Buckley came out recently and acknowledged reality—namely that Bennett’s lucrative virtue racket is as dead as dead can be.

I am praying that the sanctimonious butterball gets a clue and takes a 20-year vow of silence as penance. However, I’m not betting on it. The right wing masses are marks who gets conned again and again--for instance, Dr. Laura continues to berate her callers who confess to have had premarital sex even though nude pictures of the queen bee surfaced from her former paramour (I was unlucky enough to click on a site that had pictures of Schlessinger’s 1970’s fur pie; it still gives me nightmares).

Even though I have known Bennett to be a complete phony long before the gambling revelations (scroll down to my April 3 post), it is heartening that others know about it now. Here are the Bennett’s sins (which were plain to see long before the gambling revelations):

1.Hubris. Bennett studied the classics; didn’t he know that his attitude would lead to his downfall?
2.Selective Puritanism. The Virtue Czar also seems to see it as his birthright to give dispensation to sinners on the right at the same time he berates those on the left for lesser sins.
3.Encouraging people to be dour wet blanket killjoys.
4.Being a lying tub of shit
5.Using the concept of virtue as a partisan weapon. For example, despite being exposed as a liar, Bennett was part of the intellectually dishonest bandwagon that portrayed Al Gore as a pathological liar at the same time that George W. Bush was lying through his teeth (click here for a good recent article on the matter).
6.Taking Sun Myung Moon’s money. Giving credibility to Moon, in my opinion, is a lot worse than pissing away money on gambling that was “earned” from preaching virtue and self-restraint.

One thing that irritated me about Bennett was his notion that his Puritan view of virtue was the only legitimate model of virtue and the only one worthy of discussion. I believe that partially led to his downfall (I’ll discuss this later). Let’s look at another model of morality—namely my model. Unlike Bennett, I don’t presume that my model is the only way to approach morality (even though there is no less empirical evidence for my model of morality than Bennett’s Puritanical model).

My model starts with the four aims of life: kama, artha, dharma, and moksha. Kama refers to physical pleasure. Artha is material wealth. Dharma is the ethical framework by which one attains kama and artha (e.g., it is not dharmic to achieve kama by seducing another man’s wife). Moksha is more metaphysical and it refers to the ultimate goal of ending the cycle of birth and rebirth. This model works well for me but I don’t view those who don’t adhere to it as ipso facto immoral as Bennett does with his model.

This contrasts with Bennett’s anhedonic worldview that puts people (including Bennett himself) in punitive and compulsive cycles of behavior (for more on this, read the works of Abraham Maslow). Sitting alone blowing massive amounts of money on video poker while casino workers were laughing behind your back is pathetic. My entertainment budget is something like .000001 percent of Bennett’s and I have a hundred times more fun than he ever had.

I have a solution: if Bennett’s doormat of a wife gains some self-respect and dumps him, then for a modest fee, I would be glad to take Bennett out on the town and show him what fun is. We can crash some parties and meet interesting people (if Bennett were to invest in a couple films, he could legitimately tell women that he’s a movie producer). I can take Bennett to some yoga classes where he can meet some hot and in-shape babes (plus yoga would be great for weight loss and to loosen the kundalini blockage in the root chakra area--this will allow Bennett to unclench his sphincter muscles). I won’t charge much (which is good because the money from Bennett’s virtue scam will be gone soon). I can show Bennett the meaning of the word fun at bargain basement prices. How do I contact him?