Word: scandalizer
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...details poured out about the illegal and unseemly activities of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, White House officials sought to portray the scandal as a Capitol Hill affair with little relevance to them. Peppered for days with questions about Abramoff's visits to the White House, press secretary Scott McClellan said the now disgraced lobbyist had attended two huge holiday receptions and a few "staff-level meetings" that were not worth describing further. "The President does not know him, nor does the President recall ever meeting him," McClellan said...
...eventually because celebrity tabloids are on the prowl for them. And that has been a fear of the Bush team's for the past several months: that a picture of the President with the admitted felon could become the iconic image of direct presidential involvement in a burgeoning corruption scandal like the shots of President Bill Clinton at White House coffees for campaign contributors in the mid-1990s...
...Abramoff and, in each view, one of the lobbyist's sons (three of his five children are boys). A sixth picture shows several Abramoff children with Bush and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who is now pushing to tighten lobbying laws after declining to do so last year when the scandal was in its early stages...
...change of heart? Bush has always shared the conservative aversion to big government programs, his aides insist. There are also short-term political points at stake. The Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal makes this an ideal time to go after what are known as earmarks--that is, spending placed in legislation, often without public review, for specific projects. That pork is a mainstay of the lobbying industry. And there is little money to spend anyway, so Bush might as well retool himself as a fearless budget cop. "Listen, we got a lot of people in Washington who preach fiscal discipline...
...their mark on pop culture, there comes a flashpoint when everyone's talking about the same thing. Call it the Bennifer blitz, the Monica moment, the Janet Jackson distraction. Ground down and fed up by news that matters, Americans lock their vision on a movie-star romance, a sex scandal, a Super Bowl oops as tabloid headlines and talk-show hosts exploit and orchestrate the public's evanescent fervor...