Interesting he only cites a half-dozen Republicans who, no surprise, oppose legalizing anything wilder than square dancing. It didn’t even occur to him he could have bolstered his credibility by also naming a few equally abstemious Democrats? For the LA Times? The only explanation is he hopes to hang the albatross of weed around Democrats’ necks, so that True Americans turn out in record numbers to crush them in 2016.
Too bad about those True Americans, bro. They’re high.
In 2003 it became publicly known that Bennett was a high-stakes gambler who reportedly lost millions of dollars in Las Vegas.
He is a self loathing “asshole” degenerate gambler, nothing more & nothing less.
Yeah, the revelation that this blowhard was hanging out in Indian casinos made my day.
I don’t “partake,” but I’m rather proud that my state is going legal. If only because The Oregonian is now running would-once-be-surreal investigative articles about pesticides showing up in organic weed.
((About – 15 years ago? – Bennet was indirectly responsible for a moment of surreal despair.
He wrote a book, The Book of Virtues, that was a brief bestsellery hit. Moral-laden stories, many from the Bible, that were supposed to put your kids on the right path.
This resulted in a smarmy animated cartoon, in which kids visited a group talking animal friends who’d sit them down and tell them stories.
So. Christmas time. I’m in The Great Mall of the Bay Area [?], this cavernous joint down in Milpitas. A big racetrack shaped joint with no windows or skylights, just this big dark echoey void above the corridor. And they had these clusters of monitors hanging about . . . playing the Book of Virtues cartoon. I’m not at my best in crowded malls, and the Xmas smarm is thick, and on top of it, this preachy cartoon with animals narrating Bible stories. ))
he looks good for a corpse.
Yet another gift from the Reagan years!
Thanks Ronny, where ever you are…
That article reminds me of Winston Churchill’s putdown: “This contains every cliché except “God save the Queen” and “Please adjust your dress before leaving.””
He did miss out “reefer madness” though.
I was thinking of another William Bennett. Can anyone confirm if he’s still an arsehole too?
That is spot on. Drug prohibition and its many, many ills have been a thoroughly bi-partisan affair.
In the sentence before he mentions Mario Cuomo and Patrick Kennedy. That was just omitted from the boing boing excerpt.
The absolute best part about him being an out of control gambler was that his game of choice was video poker. Not poker. Video poker. Not a game of skill. He gambled his money on a computer that is programmed to pay out, over the long haul, 95 cents on the dollar, or 92, or 97, or whatever.
So if one plays the machines for a long time (which he did) one is guaranteed to walk out of the casino with less money than one walked in with. What a maroon.
Seeing the destruction they have caused and understanding their role in it is probably too great for the mind to deal with and overcome, so it is just easier to denegrate and blame others. Hatred is easier than empathy and regret.
Reading Bennett’s op-ed with a mental global change and replace of “marijuana” and “drugs” for firearms is kind of an interesting mental exercise.
You might be giving him too much credit. The opportunity to beat down the darkies and degenerates and hippies and so on has been a feature of the drug war from day one.
If he were just coping with moral dissonance an ‘oh woe is me that my drug war’s numerous benefits were not more visible; perhaps had they been we would not now be facing the prospect of support for legalization of the marijuana…’ piece would be drivel; but fall neatly into ‘vaguely-self-deprecating-without-admitting-any-real-responsibility’.
This is ‘damn it, in my day we listened to our betters! Now degenerate libertines lead us to ruin!’ rant. Hopefully his final days are in a hospice very concerned about the addiction potential of opiates.
And you don’t think that he’s keenly aware that video poker is a losing proposition in the long run? Chronic gamblers know what they are doing is foolish but they can’t stop because it’s an irresistible compulsion. This guy’s a dick for other reasons, sure, but I don’t take any pleasure in his gambling addiction.
off topic, but I dig the rasterized b&w portrait on purple background. 
This guy used to valorize beating up on addicts for a living. Now he does it voluntarily. Call me a bad person if you wish; but that turns every bit of misery his own addiction causes him into sweet comedy gold. All he has to do is display the most basic theory of mind and consider that the experiences of the junkies he has been crusading against are likely not so different from his own, act accordingly, and I’d be fine with calling his addiction tragic.
Until he does that, though, it’s open season.
So i guess Im trying to decide which comes first: the hate or the power? Do these assholes sleep well knowing they are doing important work? Or do they have to perpetuate the fear and hate just to live with themselves?
Kind of reminds me of the Russian (?) puppet reporter who walked out on the job. My hunch is she was making too small of a salary, or had little power, or lack of further opportunity, to convince herself she was really on the good side.
