RANDY BARNETT IS DANCING ON BILL BENNETT’S POLITICAL GRAVE:

Bennett is more than a moralist; he is a prohibitionist. And he is more than a prohibition advocate, he was the drug-czar almighty. For years he defended the current policy of ruining the lives of drug users — regardless of whether their actions were harming others. Many of us still recall his condescending reply to Milton Friedman’s open letter to him in the pages of the Wall Street Journal where he chided the Nobel Prize winner to be serious. From editorial page to podium, Bennett loudly and righteously defended the policy of wre[a]king havoc on his fellow citizens who indulged in different vices than he did — whether or not their vices happened to interfere with their abilities to perform their jobs or be good parents. It did not matter whether or not they had “spent the milk money.” All that mattered was whether they were caught by the cops. Then off to the clink with them.

Kurtz says that Bennett is entitled to run a different cost-benefit calculation for gambling than for drugs. Then why has he now said he is setting a bad example to others and quitting? Either he has just changed his cost-benefit analysis this week, or he was a hypocrite last week.

Read the whole thing. Meanwhile Peter Beinart has a long Bennett-savaging piece, too. But although it’s about hypocrisy, I find it a lot less persuasive than Barnett’s take. Beinart writes:

And, while Bennett may be one of Washington’s most high-profile right-wing moralists, he’s surely not alone. John Ashcroft, Rick Santorum, Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms, Alan Keyes, Sean Hannity–they would all come in for similar scrutiny. In fact, dozens, if not hundreds, of Republicans in Congress have probably said the same things about private morality as Bennett. If this sounds like a slippery-slope argument, it is. I don’t see any clear principle that justifies exposing Bennett’s gambling that wouldn’t justify prying into the private lives of most public representatives of the cultural right.

Sorry, but this conveniently one-sided standard, which Beinart sort-of decries but also sort-of deploys, won’t wash — at least, not until the mainstream press, and the Washington punditry, is willing to make as much of the way big-name moralizing lefties like Michael Moore treat the help as it is of the vices of right-wing moralizers. And that day is nowhere close at hand. Otherwise the scandal at living-wage-activism center ACORN would be getting the kind of attention that would be afforded to a sex scandal at Moral Majority headquarters.

UPDATE: Virginia Postrel emails:

I think you read that Beinart piece wrong. It’s not an attack on Bennett, though it has plenty of nasty things to say about him. It’s an attack on people who’ve suddenly and conveniently jettisoned their alleged social liberalism to attack Bennett.

Well, I puzzled over that, but I think Beinart is trying to have it both ways here, which is what I meant by the language about decrying and deploying. He’s sort-of complaining about people jettisoning their alleged social liberalism, but he spends a lot more time attacking Bennett’s hypocrisy in terms that sound an awful lot like the pseudo-liberals he’s talking about.