Hookergate Redux; Gratuitous Marx Reference

The fine-feathered folks at Sploid have a nice tease up about "Hookergate," the brewing prostitution-bribery scandal that involves already disgraced-and-convicted congressman Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, dismissed CIA chief Porter Goss, and now the CIA's number three honcho, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo.

I can't do justice to Sploid's diamond-hard prose, which squeezes in more innuendo and links into a few small paragraphs than is humanly possible--it's like Superman took a binful of coal and smushed into one baseball-sized gleaming diamond. So go read it here and follow its links to the outer limits of credibility on the World Wide Web.

In the meantime, let's be grateful for a scandal that may be lacking in any sort of definitive verification but more than makes up for it with incredibly idiotic nicknames for the principals.

And for a [fill-in-the-blank]-gate scandal in which the Watergate building actually plays a leading role. Which nicely closes the circle on one of the most-overused expressions in American politics and culture. Finally, at long last, we can move on to another designated suffix for scandal.

Wasn't it Marx who said that history repeats itself, first as a serious made-for-TV movie and then as an episode of Three's Company? How could a man so right about that been so wrong about the subjective theory of value? Didn't the guy ever go to a garage sale, fer chrissakes?