Word: scandalizer
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...scandal broke on April 23 when three members of the Cabinet revealed that they had, at some point, failed to make their payments. The ministers' excuses (which were a mostly believable plea that they got tripped up in the complexity of the system they helped create) fell on deaf ears. Kan, who had been among the most vocal proponents of a complete pension overhaul, dialed the outrage up another level, castigating the Cabinet members as "the three nonpayment brothers." It was great demagoguery, but as it turned out, Kan himself had not paid into the system for 10 months...
...bill, meanwhile, merely tinkers with the problem. Rather than make the system truly mandatory or combine the three systems into one, it has raised citizens' premiums and lowered their payouts-moves that are certain only to encourage more delinquency. Yet rather than focus on the real scandal-that Japan's citizens labor under a pension system that won't come close to providing for them-newspapers continue to call for more resignations. With the departure of capable politicians like Kan and Fukuda, the likelihood that the system will ever see real change is diminished. So much for Japan...
...Trusting Kim to play nice tends to be a sucker's bet. But Koizumi is willing to take the gamble, perhaps because his administration is being buffeted by an ever-widening scandal at home. Seven government ministers have admitted to skipping their payments into the national pension scheme, and last week Koizumi himself said he had, at times, failed to make payments before they became mandatory in 1986. A triumph in Pyongyang would be a welcome distraction. The automatic winner in the deal is Kim, who appears to have Japan's leader at his beck and call. But if Koizumi...
...Powell was weary of fighting ideological "utopians" in the Administration and being forced to do "damage control" and "apologizing around the world." Powell's foes, perhaps in retaliation, blamed him for being slow to decide to travel to the Middle East to help quell the furor over the abuse scandal. Says a senior Bush official of the open warfare: "It is not very conducive to a healthy working environment...
...leak overshot the mark. The report of Bush's displeasure animated the Rumsfeld critics, who along with the press interpreted the move as an attempt to make him the fall guy for the growing scandal. Democrats may have, for the moment, saved the White House, which had begun to imagine the specter of a bipartisan consensus among nodding wise men that Rumsfeld, whom Bush never intended to remove, was finished. Instead, that claim was taken up vocally by partisan Democrats, including House minority leader Nancy Pelosi and presidential challenger John Kerry. At the White House, officials exhaled, happy that...