We really have start thinking seriously about one aspect of this scandal that seems to have eluded all blogs and most of the MSM. It is an absolutely essential component to any Washington partisan dust-up and so far, everyone who has taken a stab at resolving the issue has come up miserably short. I’m talking about giving this puppy a moniker – one that fits easily in both newspaper headlines and on-screen promo frames (theme music to be determined later).

What the heck are we going to call this thing?

So far, I’ve seen some pretty lame attempts by the left to give the imbroglio its nom de scandale. They’ve tried to hearken back to their halcyon days of Watergate and in the process, dream wet dreams of bringing down the President himself by attaching the suffix “gate” to the scandal. The problem they have with this approach is the remarkable number of possibilities available. You have “Rovegate,” Plamegate,” Leakgate,” Wilsongate,” and that’s just for starters.

Clearly, we may have finally reached a point in our national life when the attachment of the suffix “gate” to every scandal may have outlived its usefulness. At first, it was clever. Then it became annoying. And now, it’s simply boring. We need something sexier, something more descriptive. Something that will help sell newspapers (God knows they need help!) as well as tear people away from Greta Van Sustern and their Natalee obsession. In short, we need to create an entirely new national narrative for our scandal plagued, celebrity obsessed culture.

I wish there was someway we could incorporate O.J. Simpson’s name into scandal monikering but take a couple of stabs at it yourself and you’ll see what a waste of time that is. There are just too many vowels. Similar results are achieved trying to incorporate J-Lo or any one of the notorious rappers whose hijinks and hoodlum antics just never quite rise to the sublime level necessary to be ensconced in the public consciousness to the point where their notoriety on “E!” or Comedy Central can translate to the political sphere.

Clearly, this is a serious crisis – a crisis in American letters as well as journalism. It’s pretty obvious we just don’t produce enough BA candidates in our top schools anymore.: Too many JD’s and MBA’s. What we need are people with the heart of a poet and the soul of a serial killer to come up with names of our political scandals that will once again rivet people to their TV’s and watch as self-important Congressmen and politicos preen, prance, prattle, and pontificate in order to give us a deeper understanding of the media frenzy.

Since no ideas are forthcoming to change the basic nature of naming our scandals, it looks like we’ll just have to fall back on the time honored tradition of naming the current dust-up after that mother of all scandals, Watergate. It was a glorious moment in the history of journalism we commemorate by naming our scandals thusly. It was when the self congratulations the press gave itself became so overbearing that after a while they got a collective crimped neck from trying to pat themselves on the back. They’ve been trying to recapture those moments ever since.

John Tierney has an idea:

So what exactly is this scandal about? Why are the villagers still screaming to burn the witch? Well, there’s always the chance that the prosecutor will turn up evidence of perjury or obstruction of justice during the investigation, which would just prove once again that the easiest way to uncover corruption in Washington is to create it yourself by investigating nonexistent crimes.

For now, though, it looks as if this scandal is about a spy who was not endangered, a whistle-blower who did not blow the whistle and was not smeared, and a White House official who has not been fired for a felony that he did not commit. And so far the only victim is a reporter who did not write a story about it.

It would be logical to name it the Not-a-gate scandal, but I prefer a bilingual variation. It may someday make a good trivia question:

What do you call a scandal that’s not scandalous?

Nadagate.

That’s a pretty good try. I think, however, I prefer “Cotton Candygate” which is a little more descriptive of the actual impact this scandal will have on far less important issues like avoiding being blown to smithereens by fanatical Islamists, social security reform, naming Justices to the highest court in the land, or other such trivialities.

“Cotton Candygate” – tastes good, gives a nice pleasant rush of euphoria for a short time, but in the end isn’t very filling. Yes…I think that describes what’s going on perfectly.