HANNITY: So you OK with a Donald Trump candidacy?
BENNETT: No, I’m not OK at all!
That was last October. Despite his anti-Trump vehemence, William J. Bennett also said, in that interview, that he’d support him if he became the nominee.
Bennett’s silence since then suggests that one of the nation’s highest-profile moralists continues to support a man who, even by the most unexacting, unpresidential standards, flagrantly fails every single chapter heading (“Courage,” “Compassion,” “Responsibility”…) in Bennett’s famous Book of Virtues.
If Bennett had included chapters titled “Cynicism” and “Expediency,” UD wouldn’t insist that he now publicly repudiate the human embodiment of the Anti-Book of Virtues. As it is, now that virtually everyone from every direction is, post-Khan, grappling with the fact that a major party has nominated a moral degenerate, it’s especially unconscionable that a person like Bennett, fundamentally animated as a political actor by moral seriousness, a national proselytizer for moral seriousness, says nothing.
Either you have moral standards and moral convictions or you don’t. It costs Bennett little to act on his convictions in this case – he’s not running for office, and no one says he has to vote for Hillary, whom he hates (not a virtue, methinks) with a passion similar to Trump’s. Where is William Bennett in this monumentally important election?