GateGate-Gate
You may have heard: the head of the CIA, Porter Goss, is stepping down after a notably brief career. A related story hasn't been getting as much ink, but plenty of bytes & pixels are being filled in the blogosphere.
It's Hookergate. Oh... wait... no. I mean, "Hookergate".
Clearly it's a scandal, because the bloggers have chosen to add the suffix "gate" to the dirty word "hooker".
First of all, Watergate is the name of a hotel that was burglarized by Nixon's cronies searching for dirt on the happless DNC. You can read about it in the wikipedia (thank god for the wikipedia) if you need to, but clearly the scandal that drove Nixon out of the White House did not involve him using excessive amounts of water.
If only the hotel had been the Hilton/Best Western. Then we wouldn't be saddled with this meaningless suffix.
My second gripe about the name is that it puts the emphasis for the scandal on the hookers that were supposedly sometimes used in the influence peddling. As though influence peddling not involving prostitution would be fine.
Can't we have moral outrage stemming from the fact that Bush appoints lackies to key positions in government. And then those unqualified hacks, demoralize and deflate the angencies they're supposed to be leading. Which leads us to a disaster.
Isn't it enough that Porter Goss may have done to the CIA what Michael Brown did to FEMA?
But his swift and surprising resignation wasn't due to the fact that he was incompetent. It was because Bush & company couldn't keep this story under wraps any longer. (The scandalous behavior has apparently been going on for a decade or more)
So how about a new scandal? You can call it Competencegate.
5 comments:
Well, I agree. And it also pisses me off that they are so focused on the fact that "hookers" were involved, as if we care whether congressmen are paying for sex or not; the issue is whether they're taking bribes! The sex workers are just trying to make a living.
My understanding is that the Administration on super secret anonymous background (much like this post) claims that Mr. Goss was dismissed because he was resisting Mr. Negroponte's (the Intelligence Czar) efforts to diminish the CIA's role.
Accepting that as true, and expanding on your theory, perhaps the problem with Goss was that he was actually an obstacle to Administration efforts to turn the CIA into FEMA.
interesting... perhaps they're setting up Goss as a straw man. and to make sure he can't snipe at them from retirement, the administration is leaking the material for the influence peddling scandal (much like the Valerie Plame incident).
i think that your point about the overuse of the "gate" suffix is really a metaphor for the inability of democrats to come up with any new way of communicating to the public. so rather than being creative or explaining the situation in a way that allows them to capitalize on the glaring failures of the administration and everyone it has ever appointed to any position at all, the are grasping desperately at a time (watergate) when corruption at the top of the government actually had repercussions and led to a change in leadership.
that probably explains why it annoys me so much. however, it's not just democrats and liberals who use the gate.
I think it's actually a sign that the political conversation has become idea-less. There's no such thing as facts and knowledge, because it's all spin. Once the pundits get their hands on it everything is an advertisement and no information has any veracity.
It's been lamented before (and certainly better), but in a world without knowledge, everything is based on the sound-byte. Daddy's National Guard vs. Swift-boat Veterans for Truth. No WMD's vs. the Patriot Act. Nut with a Shotgun vs. Weak on Defense.
Post a Comment