Word: scandalizing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Judge Susan Webber Wright's stunning decision to throw out the Jones case was an antidote to a poisonous winter of scandal. For the President, it was as close to a verdict of not guilty as he's ever likely to get in a case involving his sexual conduct. It left Ken Starr defending the continued relevance of his investigation even as White House aides spun out his obituary. It threw much of the press corps, especially its most aggressive investigative wing, into a defensive crouch. It inspired Newt Gingrich to marvel at the President's "courage." It gave feminists...
...thinning agenda and a sense that the best is over. But this year the trends aren't cooperating. The Republicans are running behind the Democrats in generic polls about the election, as much as 10% in some surveys. No one, especially the G.O.P., wants to be marketing scandal during the autumn. Better, as a Gingrich strategist put it, to intone, "'We have the papers; we're reviewing them. We have the papers; we're reviewing them.' That's what we would say. Over and over...
...mongers and moralizing tut-tutters; this is still a great country, and Paula Jones has proved it to be so. There was a time when only domestic fat cats and foreign tyrants could bring a presidency to the brink of destruction. But Paula Jones has democratized the calculus of scandal. She earned $12,000 working for something called the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission--surely the bureaucratic equivalent of the Maytag repair service. One spring day, as she manned a registration desk at a conference, fate brought her into the line of sight of her Governor, who allegedly divined beneath...
Celebrity crises can have a salutary effect. Just as Ronald Reagan's polyps sent a lot of people for colonoscopies, certain behavior exhibited during periods of scandal should be examined...
...CHATTERING CLASSES: Oh, shut up. And turn those klieg lights off. The need to fill airtime by the All-Scandal, All-the-Time networks grew so great that second- and third-tier pundits like me could command a limo. The pressure to top one's colleagues led to premature enunciation of the I word (most conspicuously by George Stephanopoulos to prove his independence) and predictions that the patient had only days to live. When Americans overwhelmingly sided with the President, the press attributed it to falling morals. Virtue pundit Bill Bennett turned on his natural allies--ordinary folk and Billy...