Speaking of tacky, see Evan Kirchhoff on Bennett's gambling (link via Colby Cosh):

I think the worst aspect of this story for Bill Bennett isn't the fact that Mr. Book of Virtues turns out to be a feverish Vegas gambler who has burned through sums of money potentially in the high seven figures, but the fact that he's done it in the trashiest possible way....

the revelation that what turns Bennett's crank is squatting on a solitary stool for hours at a time, stabbing at blinking slot-machine buttons like a Skinner-boxed rodent, has got to be hard for a lot of his fans to take....

Hmm...sounds like Bennett's a philistine to me. And this is priceless:

Bennett is not a cold rationalist; he believes in the personal God of traditional Christianity, a deity who takes a direct interest in human affairs. That's fair enough. What interests me is how he integrated the two cosmologies of theism and magical thinking, which would seem to contradict each other. Or did he subconsciously see them as same thing? Did he believe, for example, that slot-machine wins accrue naturally to the virtuous?