May 31, 2003

Should we judge Bill Bennett for being an obsessive gambler, for losing over $1 million in a two-month period and $8 million over ten years? He wouldn’t have it any other way. In his 1998 bestseller, The Death of Outrage, Bennett bemoaned the wretched moral state of our nation, and said part of the problem is that we’re afraid to judge people on moral issues. “We live in an era when it has become unfashionable to make judgments on a whole range of consequential behaviors and attitudes.” He called for a revival of judgmentalism.

Set a straight course and keep to it, and do not be dismayed in the face of adversity. (Ecclesiasticus 2:2, The Apocrypha, Revised English Bible)

Juan Williams is senior correspondent for National Public Radio. For 23 years he was a reporter and columnist for the Washington Post and is the author of Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary and the best-selling Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years 1954-1965, which was the companion volume to the award-winning PBS series of the same name.

In the hilarious, pitch-perfect Christopher Guest parody, A Mighty Wind, three 1960s folk bands participate in a reunion concert to memorialize the promoter who brought them to the public eye. Guest and co-writer Eugene Levy burlesque the most celebrated of the folkies. Michael Mc­Kean, Harry Shearer and Guest himself play the Folksmen, whose close harmonies, rambling didactic spiels and affable camp-counselor personalities recall the Kingston Trio.