Editorial: CULTURE WATCH: Bennett and His Enemies.

The sad business of William Bennett requires discouraging commentary. There is, first, the existential point, which is that Bill Bennett is through. We speak, of course, of his public life. He is objectively discredited. He will not be proffered any public post by any president into the foreseeable future. He will not publish another book on another virtue, if there is any he has neglected to write about. It is possible that the books written by him on the subject, sitting in bookstores, will work their way to the remainder houses. These are the consequences of the damage he has done to himself. It could always be that his inherent talents will prevail over undiscriminating fate. There are those who hope it will be so.

A second question immediately arises: Has justice been done? Only in a raw parsing of the term, because what he did can correctly be deemed a private act immune from retributory sanction. It was wanton behavior, indisputably, but it was his own money being dissipated. The manner in which this was done raises eyebrows. If he had spent millions in decorating costs, his story would merely have been the tale of one more spendthrift. There is something about gambling when done other than on a scale associated with gin rummy and bridge, that is inherently censurable. Sensible criticism focuses on the unbounded character of his dissipation. When connected to stories of arrivals at casinos at 3 o'clock in the morning, to pump the $500 slot machines until dawn, what is depicted is addiction at pathological levels. The public thinks to reproach such conduct, not to okay it under the libertarian rubric.

That said, one turns to his critics. And the first question has to do with their startling apparent indifference to the means by which the disclosures were done. When Sen. Gary Hart was photographed setting out with his mistress, there was justification of a kind because he had specifically taunted the press with the challenge to track him down and expose him. There was nothing of that nature, that we have been told, that justified worming one's way into the records of casino transactions involving William Bennett. And that brings up the question: Who is handing down judgments against the casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City that gave out such information as Bennett's critics, in a different mode, would join in denouncing as arrant invasion of privacy? Even brothel keepers are bound by tradition to keeping the ...