The cycle of scandal

1. Republicans get themselves involved in an actual scandal so big it winds up with a name that everyone knows.
2. Democrats get into power, and Republicans and their media enablers try and affix that name to every minor and/or wholly made-up scandal that comes along.
3. Republicans then have a license to get into as many scandals as they want, and any time the Democrats raise any objection the media will point to steps 1 and 2 and say "well, it's just politics, both sides do it."

You saw this with Watergate. The suffix "-gate" is still getting tacked onto things, but its heyday was the Clinton administration.

Just as a reminder, Watergate involved, you know, burglary, followed by breathtaking abuses of presidential power that threatened to touch off a constitutional crisis.

Which of course made it totally nonsensical to compare it to some firings in the white house travel office ("travelgate"), the unavailability of some records from an Arkansas law firm that there was no particular reason to believe contained anything askew ("filegate"), a land deal on which the Clintons lost some money in 1974 ("Whitewatergate," and boy did the press love to say that), an unfounded rumor about Bill Clinton having state troopers assist his extramarital activities ("troopergate"), or a blow job and the fact that Clinton didn't want to announce to the world that he'd gotten a blow job ("Monicagate").

But compare the media did. If Bill Clinton had stepped on someone's toe in front of a reporter, we would have been hearing breathless reporting on "toegate" for two months. And right-wingers would still be shouting about it any time the subject of Abu Ghraib came up.

And in my opinion at least, those phony scandals have given George W. Bush a lot of cover. Sure, he's authorizing torture, trashing the fourth amendment and lying the country into illegal, murderous and ruinous wars, but just look at all those Clinton scandals! See, we might as well just sit back and enjoy it 'cause, you know, both sides do bad stuff.

So, anyway, the scandal word du jour, "-gate" having run its course apparently, is "swiftboating."

You may recall four years ago, when the Democrats nominated a decorated Vietnam veteran who had been captain of a swift boat in Vietnam for the presidency. In response, people with connections to Karl Rove started a group called the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, which consisted of people who had been on similar boats but not Kerry's, and lied for months about things like having seen Kerry not doing the things he got his medals for. And the press treated this as legitimate.

After their boy George W. Bush was safely reelected, the press was free to admit that, you know, actually, those guys were full of shit. And so, "swiftboating" became a synonym for the ugliest, most dishonest kind of political smear job.

So, recently, Gen. Wesley Clark, who has streets named after him in Kosovo by the way, said that he didn't think John McCain's having been a POW was an automatic qualifier for the presidency.

And the good boys and girls of the press, whose useful memory extends to whatever happened 15 minutes ago in the green room (or whatever the last McCain operative they talked to told them to say), have repeatedly called this Clark's "swiftboating" of McCain.

One more time, kids. "Swiftboating," if it means anything, means lying. Clark was expressing an opinion, and being perfectly honest about the facts in doing so.

But you know this is only the beginning. This is going to happen a lot over the next four months. Furthermore, down the road, you are going to hear the completely reprehensible lies that sank John Kerry in 2004 compared, frequently and unapologetically, to all the people in 2008 who questioned whether we should, you know, actually look at McCain's policies and fitness for high office rather than just assuming that honorable military service makes you deserve to be president. (Funny how that argument only works if you're a Republican, too, isn't it?)

Fight the power.