No More Gates

The election is over at long last. My fervent hope for the next four years is that we learn to banish the word gate from our vocabulary. I am not talking about actual gates, like the Sather Gate pictured below. I am talking about the unfortunate habit of adding -gate on to a word to define a scandal. I have two reasons for this, one stylistic and one substantive.



Every since Watergate, lazy journalists have used gate to name a scandal. We have had Troopergate I, II and II (involving Bill Clinton, Elliot Spitzer and Sarah Palin respectively), Filegate, Passportgate, Plamegate, Travelgate, etc. Merely adding the suffix gate onto a scandal is a poor substitute for thought and should be banned from the lexicon. Iran-Contra and Whitewater are examples of how an affair can stand on its own the necessity to remind people that it is a scandal by calling it a gate.

However, on a more serious level, I hope that we will give the scandals a rest for a while. When Bill Clinton became president, the right wing tried to negate the election results by launching a series of investigations into the Clintons and their associates. This ended with the sorry spectacle of the President lying under oath about his sexual pecadillos and facing an impeachment trial. While perjury is a serious matter, there was no need for the question to be asked in the first place.

The Democrats have learned to respond in kind with a never-ending string of so-called ethics scandals including the politically motivated prosecution of Tom Delay and the Valerie Plame affair.

Are we any better off for having spent the last sixteen years scandalizing each other? Careers have been destroyed, people have gone to jail and millions have been spent on special prosecutors. However, when it was all said and done, did any of it make our government better or improve us as a nation? I don't think so.

My fervent hope would be that we can lay off of the scandals for a while. If you disagree with President Obama (a position I may find myself in), debate his policies and discuss his priorities. However, we can do without the tabloid politics.