Brad DeLong begins a very intellectually honest defense of accusations that former Education Secretary and drug tsar Bill Bennett is a racist thusly:
Bill Bennett is a hypocrite, a loathsome fungus on the tree of American politics, a man who has worked unceasingly to make America a worse place–when he’s not publishing the work of others under his own name, or rolling the dice at Las Vegas while claiming that America’s poor would be rich if only they had the righteousness and moral fiber than he does. But Bill Bennett is not afflicted with genocidal fantasies about ethnically cleansing African-Americans.
While I disagree on DeLong’s assessment of Bennett’s character, that’s pretty funny.
He closes the post with several maxims that should be heeded by all:
[N]ever get involved in a land war in Asia; do not read My Pet Goat when death is on the line; never play poker with a man named ‘Doc’; never accept a battle of wits where iocane powder is a factor; never blithely download and install a file from Microsoft without carefully, carefully researching what it will do beforehand; never get involved in an argument over Noam Chomsky; and never post about human genetics on you weblog.
Sound advice, indeed.
