From Watergate to Troopergate: Isn't it Time to Retire the Use of the Word "Gate" to Create a Shorthand for All Political Scandals?

Can we all agree that a certain four-letter word is well beyond its retirement age? How many of the rest you are tired of hearing every political scandal reduced to meaningless by attaching the word "Gate" at the end? There was a perfectly good reason why Watergate was chosen to represent that particular Presidential scandal; the Watergate hotel was the epicenter from which the enormity of Pres. Richard Nixon's scandalous activity sent shock waves around the world. All it probably would have taken for Americans to have remained ignorant forever of the multitude of impeachable offenses of the Nixon administration would have been for someone smarter than G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt to have been drafted by Haldeman and Ehrlichman to do the really dirty work. Watergate was a perfect name for that scandal; Contragate, Zippergate, and, now, Troopergate, are just plain silly.

The reason that Sarah Palin's attempt to use her influence to get what is, admittedly, a rather unpleasant individual removed from his job as a state trooper has been dubbed Troopergate is because the media is lazy. This should come as no surprise since it took an entire term of George W. Bush before the mainstream media got up off their collective fat butts and started looking into the 900 lies that the White House told about Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Were the American mainstream media even possessed of one-tenth the scrappiness of Woodward and Bernstein, George W. Bush would never have finally gotten elected President in 2004 after being appointed to that position in 2000. It is the ultimate insult to the fortitude of Woodstein that now, almost forty years later, the press is still attaching the word "gate" to create easy shorthand for a political scandal.

Would it really take that much effort for the press to invent an apt one-word description for each subsequent political scandal in the wake of Watergate that perceptively quantifies the vastness of the inequities to make it palatable to the masses? For instance, rather than taking the lazy route calling what Ronald Reagan did during the Iran/Contra Contragate, why not call it by what it was: Ronald Treason. And instead of distinctly unhumorous and plainly stupid term Zippergate to describe the scandal involving Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, would it not have been more apt to have called it Revenge of the Republicans? As far as Troopergate, how about The Palin Protection? Anything, even the Palin Protection, would be preferable to Troopergate.

It is well past time to retire the word "gate" from the vernacular of political scandals. If we never hear a political scandal referred to with that four-letter word at the end again it would be a small step in the direction toward a better America. Now if we could just find out why conservatives hate America so much that they would inflict another four to eight years of George W. Bush's failed policies upon us.