No, instead of sitting down with his old morality-cop buddies for a heart-to-heart about life's complexities and the impossibility of being perfect, Bennett gave up gambling. Another victory for James Dobson, who released this typically smug, sanctimonious statement: "We commend Dr. Bennett for acknowledging his problem and for stating emphatically, 'My gambling days are over.' Our prayers will be with him and his family in the days ahead."

I'm sorry to see Bennett cave to bullies like Dobson, but I wasn't surprised. Certainly I'd rather have him on the slot machines than at his word processor, churning out his windy, empty manifestos. I don't enjoy gambling myself, but I don't disapprove of it.

The fact is we all seek release, we all seek pleasure, we all seek escape. I don't begrudge Bennett his. What I begrudge is that he and his fellow morality cops -- -- still fighting the spirit of the '60s, 35 years later -- want to deny pleasure and escape to the rest of us. I think the Republicans' parsing of what Bennett did and didn't do, to show why he's not a hypocrite, is hilarious. Let's be honest: He's made a huge living out of being a scold. As Michael Kinsley noted first (and I like Kinsley best when he does high moral dudgeon on behalf of tolerance), Bennett believes "unrestricted personal liberty" is a problem for America, he wants us to "enter judgments on a whole range of behaviors and attitudes," not just what's illegal. So none of Bennett's personal flaws are off-limit for public scrutiny, and all the ways he fails to live up to his high Christian standards would seem to be fair game for comment.

Clearly gambling isn't his only sin. He's a big, beefy fellow; even his defender Jonah Goldberg of National Review acknowledges he might have a problem with gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins. And though many conservative Christian sects forbid smoking, he had a bad nicotine habit back when he was drug czar (while he was preaching long jail terms for pot smokers), though by most accounts he eventually gave it up. In 2000 he ruled that secrets about politicians' marital infidelity were fair game for journalists and other candidates. "If adultery is part of your baggage, forget it," he warned prospective Republican candidates. Yet when it came to his gambling -- which, like adultery, is legal but forbidden by many Christian leaders -- he wanted a zone of privacy around his private life. His personal profile at one casino warned: "NO CONTACT AT RES OR BIZ!!!" I call that hypocrisy.

And personally, I think he's a liar, too. His low point, in my opinion, came in 1997, when he peddled the outrageous claim that the average life expectancy for gay men in America was 43. He wouldn't give it up even after critics poked holes in the way his source came up with it -- reading obituaries and news stories in gay papers and averaging the ages of those listed as dead. No reasonably intelligent person -- and Bennett's been called a lot of things, but dumb ain't one of them -- could believe a statistic cobbled together so lamely. So I call his continuing to use it lying. His defenders might call it something else, but I think anyone so prone to judgment about others ought to have Caesar's wife standards when it comes to the truth.

So by my accounting Bennett's been guilty of many moral failings over the years: gambling, overeating, smoking, purveying falsehoods, aiding and abetting America's outrageous and unjust vendetta against marijuana users, keeping an $8 million secret from his wife, Elayne. Clearly, Bill Bennett has parsed his way through the Bible, much the way the rest of us do, to keep himself on the good side of the ledger with the Lord.

Some of his defenders say the fact that he failed to live up to his own standards doesn't mean his standards are wrong, or that his crusade is now discredited. Jonah Goldberg quotes moral philosopher Max Scheler's maxim that "A sign pointing to Boston doesn't have to go there." Nice. But Bennett wasn't merely a signpost -- he's more like an armed commandant who stops you on the road to Philadelphia and forces you to Boston at gunpoint. Bennett didn't merely preach: He aligned himself with a movement that wants to punish those who reach different moral conclusions than it does -- jail them, bar them from public office, use the law to thwart them, at minimum hector and humiliate them. Over the years he's backed government action -- not merely moral instruction -- to ban gay marriage, make divorce harder, increase penalties for pot smoking, teach his own brand of "moral education" in public schools. So the fact that he hasn't been able to live within the narrow parameters set by his fellow bullies and scolds, limits they would impose on the rest of us, makes him a dangerous hypocrite, no matter what Bill Kristol or Jonah Goldberg say.

Just weeks after the Santorum flap, in which the GOP's No. 3 Senate leader got away not only with comparing homosexuality to incest and bestiality, but with criticizing the Supreme Court decision that made contraception legal and denying our right to privacy -- I find myself wondering again: What happened to the libertarian wing of the Republican Party? What happened to the Goldwaters, the freedom-loving heirs of Jefferson, the dauntless defenders of the rights of the individual against a coercive, moralizing state? Did all of them sell their souls to the Christian right when that seemed to be the party's only way back to national standing? A key problem is that during impeachment, many of them threw their lot in with the Bible-thumpers, the outrage peddlers, the morality police. They profited politically from their alliance with the soldiers of sanctimony, and they haven't been able to part company.

The incomparable R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. wrote a letter to Andrew Sullivan Wednesday, taking him to task for his mild rebuke of the impeachment brigade over its excesses. "The American Spectator's reportage on Boy Clinton in the 1990s is in no way comparable to the invasion of Bill Bennett's privacy by the Washington Monthly and Newsweek," he sputtered. "From our first Troopergate story ... I maintained that Clinton's fundamental offense was not sex, but the abuse of power." The truth is that the Spectator and other Clinton enemies paid troopers and grifters and liars and con men to sift through every detail of the president's private life, and they defended using what they found by any means necessary. Depending on the audience, Clinton's offense was sex, it was sex with an intern, it was adultery, it was lying, it was lying under oath, it was abuse of power. It was whatever was handy.

Reading an excerpt from Sidney Blumenthal's "The Clinton Wars," I found another great Bill Kristol quote, explaining why the burst of stories about Republican adulterers in 1998 -- Hyde, Burton, Chenoweth, Livingston -- would hurt Clinton, not the GOP. "Republicans have old-fashioned extramarital affairs with other adults. Those really are moral lapses that are private and more easily forgiven and very different from taking advantage of a young person who works for you when you're president." The echo with his defense of Bennett -- the rambling cadence, the casuistry, the shameless spinning, again invoking "privacy," when leading members of his party don't believe we have a right to it -- was almost eerie.

And I found myself having another fantasy -- no, not about the day Rick Santorum's clay feet crumble. It's a better, more worthy fantasy: that some day Kristol will wake up, read another one of his quotes explaining why Republican moral failings don't matter as much as Democrats' do, and decide he can't live with himself anymore. And he'll pull together other loyal GOP spinners who are smart enough to know better, and they'll all vow to stop it. They'll make common cause with the biggest voting bloc, by far, in politics: the millions of Americans who try to lead a good life, but can't always live up to their own moral standards, let alone those of the Christian Taliban. You know who I mean: the gays, the divorced, the single parents. Married people who like sex and think what they do in the bedroom should stay private. Smokers, drinkers, gamblers, people who watch pornography, recreational potheads. People who sometimes drive over the speed limit. Writers who think bad thoughts about scary, sanctimonious senators. All of us.

When that day comes, Republicans and Democrats will fight about tax cuts and rebuilding Iraq; privatizing Social Security and school vouchers. But we won't fight over who's got the corner on morality. We'll stop lobbing bricks at one another's glass houses. But until Republicans recover from their dependency on hectoring, divisive leaders like Dobson and Santorum and Bennett, until they give up their shaming and blaming and witch hunting and finger-pointing the way Bennett has promised to give up gambling, well, don't expect liberals to look away from Mr. Virtue's hypocrisy -- and the other inevitable, delectable stories like it -- anytime soon.

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