Good news indeed! You may remember the unfortunately still with us William J. Bennett, once secretary of education and later drug “czar”—doing the same bang-up job in both positions—who has been harrumphing about the decline and fall of the “West” for the past thirty-five years and now is illustrating it by harrumphing on behalf of Donald Trump.
OK, none of that is the good news. The good news is this: If you search on Microsoft’s “Edge” for “William Ben” you will not get William Bennett but rather B-movie stalwart William Bendix, best remembered, if at all, for the fifties B&W sit-com “The Life of Riley”, which I watched devotedly as a kid. Bendix played “Riley”, who worked as a riveter in the Cunningham Aircraft factory with his buddy Gillis. In every episode, wise-guy Gillis would pull Riley in some sort of hustle that would inevitably backfire, causing Riley to inevitably exclaim, just before the closing credits, “What a revoltin’ development this is!” After which we would laugh, heartily.
So there it is, former Sec Ed/Drug “Czar”/blowhard William J. Bennett! Get in line behind William Bendix! Where you belong!
Afterwords
In 1994 Bennett wrote a ghastly book called The Book of Virtues, which made him an enormous pile of cash. Ten years later, preachy Bill’s rep for virtue took a serious hit when it was revealed that he was a compulsive high-stakes gambler.1 Bill Buckley, who seems to have resented Bill’s rep just a tad, wrote an unintentionally hilarious column on the matter, pretending to pity Bill while doing his best to kick all of Bill’s teeth in, even the back molars and the wisdom teeth, if Bill had any. There’s only room for one preening, overweening moralizing hypocrite named Bill in this town and that’s me, motherfucker!
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Bennett’s excuse was that the Catholic Church, unlike most Protestant sects, does not consider gambling a major sin, as long as you can afford it. And Bill was loaded! ↩︎
