{"id":233,"date":"2003-05-04T02:37:00","date_gmt":"2003-05-04T02:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=233"},"modified":"2003-05-04T02:37:00","modified_gmt":"2003-05-04T02:37:00","slug":"233","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=233","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p><b>THE THING I FOUND MOST AMAZING ABOUT THE BILL BENNETT STORY:<\/b><\/p>\n<p>It wasn&#8217;t the gambling habit but the fact that he could plunk down 8 mill and not miss it. In our lifetime political discussion have become entertainment and celebrity and with it comes all the riches formerly due &#8211; or perhaps in excess of &#8211; a medium grade Hollywood movie star. It&#8217;s hard to imagine Walter Lippmann, despite having been America&#8217;s only big league pundit for half a century, earning enough from his political commentary to afford the gambling habit of a Turkish pasha.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t begrudge Mr. Bennett a cent of what he spent. He earned it, it didn&#8217;t come out of my or anybody else&#8217;s pocket unless they were willing to buy his books or pay for his time and he&#8217;s free to spend it any way he chooses. If instead of gambling in Vegas Bennett gambled on -say &#8211; the value of a Monet bought at auction going up &#8211; no one would have a second thought about it but fundamentally the operating principle of speculation is the same. It&#8217;s also nice to see someone reaping the rewards of being smart and well educated instead of for ball-handling skills and 40 yard dash times.<\/p>\n<p>He may take a hit on the virtues thing however.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>THE THING I FOUND MOST AMAZING ABOUT THE BILL BENNETT STORY: It wasn&#8217;t the gambling habit but the fact that he could plunk down 8 mill and not miss it. In our lifetime political discussion have become entertainment and celebrity and with it comes all the riches formerly due &#8211; or perhaps in excess of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}