Posted by
GeorgeBruno on Friday, March 20, 2009 9:30:51 PM
#10
William John Bennett (born July 3, 1943) is an American conservative pundit, politician, and political theorist. He served as United States Secretary of Education from 1985 to 1988. He also held the post of Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (or "Drug Czar") under George H. W. Bush.
Bennett was born in Brooklyn but later moved to Washington, D.C., where he attended Gonzaga College High School. He graduated from Williams College and went on to get a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in Political Philosophy. He also has a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
From 1976 to 1981 he was the executive director of the National Humanities Center, a private research facility in North Carolina. In 1981 President Ronald Reagan appointed him to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, where he served until Reagan appointed him Secretary of Education in 1985. It was in 1986 that Bennett switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Bennett resigned from this post in 1988, and later that year was appointed to the post of Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy by President George H. W. Bush.
He is host of the daily radio show called Bennett’s Morning in America. I cannot listen to anything else after checking him out for about a week. He raises the bar of conversation, political interchange, and son-of-gun…..he makes sense.
He is not perfect and he’ll be the first to admit it.
I just finished his America: The Last Best Hope, Volume 1. This is probably the best “in a nutshell” version of American history WITHOUT the revisionist perspective. I’ll give you an example. Rather than hammering America for slavery and talking about reparations, he says…and I paraphrase…we have seem to forgotten that America blazed the trail for ENDING slavery in the world. Slavery had gone on for thousand of years. It was NOT invented by America as liberals would have you believe. It was tried here on this soil and IT DIDN’T WORK. In the light of thousands of years of world history, slavery had its debut and demise here in less than a century. Bondage and freedom cannot co-exist.
I can’t wait to dive into Volume 2 and also the American Patriots Almanac.
On a daily basis, he hammers away at the irrational logic of the current administration and the creeping and creepy socialism that is being thrust on us much faster than we ever thought.
He does make it pretty clear that he is a conservative FIRST, and a republican second. Yes, there is a difference. The next election will be a culturally conservative election that will be powered by conservative media and web 2.0. My prediction is that the 2012 election will be cultural and not political. Bill Bennett is one of those leading that charge.