Speaking of "witless," I give you the virtuous William J. Bennett

It was years ago, and I don't recall what the television program was, but there sat on a panel both Michael Kinsley, the liberal columnist, and William J. Bennett, author of the then-recently published Book of Virtues. After listening to Bennett prattle on for a while with insufferable arrogance about this thing and that, Kinsley got off one of the best zingers ever: "I never realized that 'smugness' was one of our virtues."

One would think that for Bennett that would have been -- what do they call it? -- ah, yes, a "teachable moment." But no. His pomposity is indefatigable. He has never hit the pause button, not even for the briefest moment of self-reexamination, on his bumptious absolutism. Bennett always knows best -- about everything.

But he's been righting this sorry world more on talk radio, and not so much television, lately. I've missed him. So it was with a considerable serving of fulfilled nostalgia that I watched him yesterday morning on CNN's "State of the Union" (maybe he's a regular there; I don't know, I'm not much of a CNN viewer) -- and, I'm pleased to report, he's as pompous as ever.

Now you know what Bill and his buddies in the neoconservative world have done for us lately, which would lead most anyone to another teachable moment. But not William J. Bennett.

No, he was, in his criticism of Obama's Iran policy, as strident as ever; it was a tour de force of silly self-assuredness gone wild. The president, in failing to follow neoconservatives' instructive lead, is being "feckless," "gutless," "pusillanimous" and "witless," said Bennett -- shrillness, apparently, being another virtue which Bennett fears we're on the verge of losing (though I can't imagine why).

If Obama, he said, won't condemn (which he in fact has, by the way, absent the Bennettesque stridency) a foreign regime's tendency to "beat the hell out of people ... then what's the point of being a moral leader?"

Well, Bill, let's just say you've already shown us the point. Let's try intelligence, for a change.