"I am Not a crook."
Strait is the Gate
for release 10-25-05
Washington D.C.
Washington is holding its breath this week. The Bush cabal is circling the wagons and hunkering down for the impending indictments in the PlameGate Affair. I know, that sounds like a novel by Robert Ludlum or John Grisham. but it's not, it's the scandal de jour and we Americans love our scandals.
Everybody knows what the issue is. It's not about who outed Valerie Plame in the process of discrediting her husband Joseph C. Wilson IV for not toeing the party line in the WMD ruse. But Wilson and Plame are both minor characters in this drama. And it's not about Judy Miller being or not being a martyr for the cause of the free press. It's not about who told what to whom and when they did it.
It's about the general culture of greed, dishonesty, mal-intent, manipulation of the press, cronyism and incompetence that pervades our government.
It is an interesting linguistic phenomenum--the suffix, 'gate'. Since Watergate every scandal has been given that tail. We've had KoreaGate, BillyGate, Iran-ContraGate, NannyGate, HairGate, TravelGate, WhitewaterGate, CamillaGate and MonicaGate. And now we have PlameGate.
The original 'Gate', Watergate, set the gold standard for scandals. The Poet's Eye sees that it is no accident that the term 'Gate' stuck. A gate is an entrance. It's a narrow opening which allows access to a larger area, a yard or a field.
Scandals are the field of dreams for any opposition party. Build it and they will come. It wasn't the petty, bungled break-in at the Watergate that brought down the Nixon regime, it was the attendant cover-up that led to the exposure of a culture of deception and dirty tricks that doomed them. It was the narrow gate that led to a larger subject.
They didn't impeach Clinton for getting a head-job from a willing young intern, they tried him for perjury and obstruction of justice for lying to a grand jury in the Paula Jones case, which was a spin-off of the Whitewater case that the prosecutor, Starr, was originally appointed to investiGate. It was a narrow gate to a larger subject.
In this sense, PlameGate is an appropriate name for the current scandal. The Plame case is just the peephole that lets us look at the history of connivance and deception and Enron-scale bad accounting, and chicanery in the intelligence dept., and the hidden agendas and greed that have characterized this government and that led up to the disaster in Iraq which is costing American lives and treasure.
The Poet's Eye will squint in laughter when the American people show this bunch of bandits the Gate.
"Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it."--Jesus Christ, Matthew 7:14
)
