With great amusement, I give you Andrew Sullivan’s latest defense of Bill Bennett (via Atrios):
KURTZ: You decided to kick him in the shins?
GREEN: Well, I’ll leave that for readers to judge. I think a lot of people saw the inconsistency in the fact that he’s decried everyone else’s morality and given himself a free pass of one vice that he himself happened to indulge in.
SULLIVAN: So he can’t win. I mean, if he actually had said gambling is a vice and wrong, you have a case that he’s a hypocrite. But he didn’t so he is not a hypocrite, but you still nail him.
GREEN: But he has. I mean, he wrote a book (UNINTELLIGIBLE) cultural indicators, he listed gambling as one of the indicators of social decline.
SULLIVAN: Yes, of course, it wasn’t him, it was some army of paid researchers that produced it for him.
GREEN: His name is on the book.
SULLIVAN: Yes, his name is on a lot of books, but it doesn’t mean he wrote them.