Word: scandalizes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There's a corollary to the notion that the scandal is what's legal: what's illegal--or arguably illegal--isn't necessarily scandalous. The press's obsession with the issue of legality can be unenlightening in this way as well, and campaign finance once again is an excellent example. Republicans and journalists are frustrated by the public's failure to rise in outrage at the daily drips of evidence that Clinton Administration figures may have broken various interpretations of the law. Maybe one reason is that these laws attempting to prevent political activity by politicians in political institutions...
Campaign finance is a perfect example. To be sure, it's bad when people break the law--especially high government officials. But as many have noted, the real scandal is how much sleazy fund raising the law allows...
...Boyden Gray, White House counsel in the Bush Administration, has become a sort of Greek chorus of the Clinton fund-raising scandal. He pops up in the newspapers after each new revelation to intone self-righteously, We never did that in our day. This generally turns out to mean, We never did exactly that. There were cocktail parties for contributors at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but "the White House per se was not used." Clinton "is giving these hour-and-a-half klatches...We would never have allowed people to pay for this kind of time in the West Wing...
...which ones grab people's attention. Deaver's p.r. firm, Edelman Public Relations Worldwide, is billing its services at a 20% discount; Deaver is donating his. Powell is not going to put up with the kind of waste made notorious by charity balls and the United Way scandal, in which money was spent to raise more money and lavished on salary and perks. The two founding partners, the Points of Light Foundation and the Corporation for National Service, were already going concerns without a lot of fluff or overhead. Powell takes no salary...
...focused national attention on the NRC's failure to enforce its safety rules at Northeast's Millstone Station in Waterford, Connecticut. Then something extraordinary happened. Where past agency chiefs had routinely ignored such criticism, NRC chairman Shirley Ann Jackson, who had taken the job just 10 months before this scandal broke, called the TIME story "a wake-up call" and "a learning moment." Revving up its inspection program at Millstone, her agency found such pervasive noncompliance that it ordered all three plants there to shut down for sweeping repairs. A year later, Northeast is facing $1 billion in shutdown costs...