Bill Bennett's America, warts and all

I like Bill Bennett. He is a great guy, and a fine American. I bought Mr. Bennett's Book of Virtue for my son and I to read together when he was five or six. It is still on his bookshelf. As much as admire Bill Bennett, he is far from perfect, his struggle with casino gambling gave the left and his enemies on the right a big stick to beat him with, and beat him they did. The most recent jab was a sly and cutting remark made by the viscous little reporter from the Washington Post, Dana Millbank, who Bennett had taken to the woodshed when she published the leak about prisoners housed in foreign prisons. I was watching Meet the Press and as usual it was four to one against Bennett, ok three and half to one because Bill Safire is in the right side of things half the time, but this is a cheap shot.

MS. MITCHELL: Dana, let me point out that The Washington Post, your newspaper, was behind the others but also did publish this story. And a story you wrote last year disclosing the secret CIA prisons won the Pulitzer Prize, but it also led to William Bennett, sitting here, saying that three reporters who won the Pulitzer Prize —you for that story and Jim Risen and others for another story were, "not worthy of an award but rather worthy of jail." Dana, how do you plead?

MS. PRIEST: Well, it's not a crime to publish classified information. And this is one of the things Mr. Bennett keeps telling people that it is. But, in fact, there are some narrow categories of information you can't publish, certain signals, communications, intelligence, the names of covert operatives and nuclear secrets.

Now why isn't it a crime? I mean, some people would like to make casino gambling a crime, but it is not a crime. Why isn't it not a crime? Because the framers of the Constitution wanted to protect the press so that they could perform a basic role in government oversight, and you can't do that. Look at the criticism that the press got after Iraq that we did not do our job on WMD. And that was all in a classified arena. To do a better job, and I believe that we should've done a better job,we would've again, found ourselves in the arena of...

Hey Dana, when you can't win the debate on facts you can always resort to personal attacks, it's very professional, I think I'll try it.

Go home and polish your pulitzer you little weasel, I wonder how you sleep at night.
Naw, it doesn't make me feel any better.
Back to my post.

I am about 100 pages into Bill Bennett's new book, America, the last best hope, and it is a wonderful read so far. Bennett is a story teller, things that I had forgotten or never knew are presented in a familiar and fascinating way. However, Bennett does not sugar coat our history, he never lets the reader forget that while the famous names were doing famous things at famous places, there were countless black slaves toiling in the fields under brutal conditions yearning not for freedom from an oppressive government, but freedom in the truest sense of the word.

The Africans brought to this new nation did not see America as a dream, to be realized, to them it was a four hundred year nightmare that took a bloody and terrible war to end. The civil war, where the freedom fought for and won at a great cost to abolish slavery, would not be fully realized for another hundred years.

He also tells the story of the native Indian tribes, some friendly, and some not. It is wonderful to read the accounts of how many times native people truly saved the American experiment from certain destruction, and saddened to know they would only be pushed further back into the wilderness until they ran out of wilderness.

Many of today's textbooks and history classes deal with those two subjects alone as American history. That is a tragedy. While no one wants the story of America to be a Hollywood version of the fifties, nor should it be told only through the lens of the wrongs and worst decisions made as our nation came into existence.

No, the America I teach my son, and now my daughter about, is the America Bennett writes about. The courage, the sacrifice, the struggle to make a new nation founded on the principals of freedom and liberty that could have, and almost failed countless times right through today. The history of how we became the last, best hope.

America- warts and all.