Newt's Five Scandal Theory of Spygate

Perhaps the biggest need surrounding the Gathering Storm of Obama era scandals, the ones that have coalesced into the Russia Collusion scandal, is to craft them into an overarching narrative.

Why? Because as long as they stay fragmented the guilty will get away free and we will not be able to refer back to something like "SpyGate" and know that every living American will know what we mean.

Dear old Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, has come up with a 5-part explanation for the SpyGate scandals, and that effort is a start. Newt says that there are five reasons for the scandals, as follows:

1. 40 years of Clinton Corruption, starting with the fabled cattle futures.
2. The deep state defense of Clinton, instead of dealing with her manifold crimes and misdemeanors.
3. The campaign to undermine and discredit Donald Trump, particularly in the anti-Republican Department of Justice.
4. Deep state resistance to accountability and transparency.
5. Panic breaking out among people that might "find themselves in danger of criminal charges."

You can see how all these explanations are cascading. Without the Clinton corruption, the deep state would not have been forced to defend the Clintons; and the deep-state defense wouldn't have been possible without the DOJ's anti-Republican bias,  and without anti-Republican bias the folly of DOJ Clinton defense would not have led to hiding the ball, and without Clinton defense the deep state operatives would not be panicking about exposure.

But really, it all issues from the Clinton private e-mail system. Without the Clinton e-mail system the DOJ would not have been put in the position of pressuring the FBI to go easy on Clinton, and I suspect that would have reduced the need to know what the Trump campaign knew about them.

In fact I would go so far  as to propose that illegal use of government surveillance and police powers tends always to issue from some petty illegal government action precipitated by a rules-don't-apply-to-me corrupt leader. Once a government cabal starts down this road it tends to get ensnared in its own illegality, as in the Shakepearean tag "oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive."

Or, as they said in the Watergate era, "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up."

May I make a small request of our noble political elite? Would you please stop your corrupt and vile behavior? Because, as in real war, it is the buck privates, the low-level political operatives that get chewed up in the meat-grinder. So if you are in politics to represent the little people -- and what politician isn't -- then the first thing you should be thinking about is the little guy in your campaign  or your administration that is going to be taking the enemy fire rather than you, the political general well behind the front lines.

But still, while Newt's five-scandal theory is a good idea, I am still drawn to Verdi's demand of his librettist, Piave, in the TV series The Life of Verdi. Verdi demanded that Piave stop pouring out so many useless words. He wanted them all to be boiled down into just a few, or even the One Word that he would set to music.

That is the challenge of the Obama-Clinton-Deep-State scandals. They need to be reduced to "one word," the one word that every American will henceforth know and associate with something foul, something unclean, "something rotten in the State of Denmark."

I'd say that the One Word should help symbolize what every ordinary American knows. If he or she had been caught mishandling classified government information, they would now be in jail.