Nadagate!

One of the most remarkable modern sculptors, Frederick Hart, carved one of the modern era's most remarkable sculptures, Ex Nihilo, which graces the main portal of Washington National Cathedral.

As most of you already know, Ex Nihilo (out of nothingness) is a creation scene; in fact, THE creation scene, from Genesis.

But it seems that the Washington media, joined by the national breathless left, have engaged in their own attempt at creating something from nothing over the past week. Not being God, however, their efforts led not to creation out of chaos, but to manufactured stories out of nothingness.

The most concise writing on this I've found is John Tierney's op-ed in today's New York Times. It's accurate, humorous, and it does what few columns can do; it coins a word to describe the contents of this horrendous scandal. Welcome to Nadagate.

Mr. Wilson presented himself as a courageous truth-teller who was being attacked by lying partisans, but he himself became a Democratic partisan (working with the John Kerry presidential campaign) who had a problem with facts. He denied that his wife had anything to do with his assignment in Niger, but Senate investigators found a memo in which she recommended him.

Karl Rove's version of events now looks less like a smear and more like the truth: Mr. Wilson's investigation, far from being requested and then suppressed by a White House afraid of its contents, was a low-level report of not much interest to anyone outside the Wilson household. . . .

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.

A divine way of summing up the vacuity of the political left.