Scandal

Vice President Gore will make history today by tapping a Jewish senator, Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, as his running mate. Democrats hope Lieberman's reputation for moral rectitude - including his condemnation of President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky - will offset Gore's association with scandal. Gore called Lieberman to offer him the vice presidential slot yesterday afternoon, hours after Gore's campaign put out word of the selection. Before ending their call, the Southern Baptist vice president and the Orthodox Jewish senator prayed together.

I'M SORRY TO hear that Cardinal Bevilacqua is sick, but I have no sympathy for him. He wasn't sick when the priest sexual-abuse scandal broke. He wasn't sick when the attorneys the diocese hired played hardball with the victims and their families. He wasn't sick when the coverups were going on. He wants to claim that the grand jury is disrespecting him, but what about the victims and their families who were disrespected by diocesan attorneys, and who were lied to - what about them?

ABC's sultry prime-time hit Scandal is a quick-paced drama starring Kerry Washington as high-powered crisis manager Olivia Pope. Pope, a no-nonsense-yet-emotionally vulnerable black woman, is having a steamy affair with the white Republican president of the United States, Fitzgerald "Fitz" Grant, played by the guy you'll remember as the baddie from Ghost, Tony Goldwyn. It's crazy, it's dizzying, and we love it. Scandal's success this season - it ranks a strong second in its 10 p.m. time slot in total viewers ages 18 to 49 - is more than confirmation that America loves a good nighttime soap.

WASHINGTON - Three more Secret Service employees have been forced out of the government, bringing to nine the number of people who have lost their jobs in the prostitution scandal roiling the agency. Two employees have resigned and a third is having his national-security clearance revoked, the Secret Service said Tuesday. The employee whose clearance is being revoked can appeal the decision. Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said one of the resigning agents stayed at the Hilton Hotel in Cartagena, Colombia, where Obama stayed for the Summit of Americas.

So what are we to call this emerging scandal? How about "Iranamok"? Or "Contradeceptive"? Or maybe "the Swiss Connection"? While Washington goes about the serious business of sorting out who did what and who knew what in the matter of U.S. arms sales to Iran, through Israel, with some of the payments diverted to Nicaraguan rebels, known as contras, by way of a Swiss bank account, a lot of less-serious folks are struggling to come up with...

LONDON - Britain's phone-hacking scandal intensified yesterday as the scope of tabloid intrusion into private voice mails became clearer: Murder victims. Terror victims. Film stars. Sports figures. Politicians. The royal family's entourage. Almost no one, it seems, was safe from a tabloid determined to beat its rivals, whatever it took. The focal point is the News of the World - now facing a spreading advertising boycott - and the top executives of its parent companies: Rebekah Brooks, former News of the World editor who is now chief executive of News International, and her boss, media potentate Rupert Murdoch.

Yup, they're all here, indelibly etched in black and white, quaint artifacts pulled from a time capsule, images plucked from an bygone era of bushy sideburns, rotary phones, bell-bottom jeans, electric typewriters, and smoke-choked rooms. Start with Richard Nixon, the star of this Smithsonian Institution photo exhibit, the President who announced 25 years ago tonight that he was resigning his office. He's up there on the museum wall in all his fading glory - scowling, pacing, cajoling, stalking along a rainswept beach with bodyguards.

There was an almost audible sigh of relief from Republicans last week when President Reagan came down from his California mountaintop and, as he phrased it, put "the machinery in place" to "restore complete confidence" in his shaken administration. Party leaders interviewed around the country expressed fervent hope that the worst of the Iran arms-sale crisis was past - a hope mixed with an uneasy uncertainty that such is really the case. As if in a chorus, almost all of them said "it's too early to tell" what the long-term impact of the crisis will be on the party or the 1988 presidential election.

The U.S. Olympic Committee directed more than $60,000 to support sports in Africa and the Mideast in hopes of currying favor for Salt Lake City's bid for the 2002 Winter Olympics, yesterday's Los Angeles Times reported. The newspaper said it obtained an internal USOC report which revealed that the USOC underwrote training costs and supplies for athletes and coaches from Sudan, Mali, Uganda and Turkey to help Salt Lake City win the 2002 Games. The USOC spent thousands of dollars on equipment such as basketballs and even gave out "pocket money" - $150 a month to each of three Sudanese athletes and a coach for four months in 1995, according to the report, which was said to give the most detailed account to date of the USOC's role in the worst corruption scandal in the history of the Olympic movement.

It is difficult to imagine how anything good could come out of the scandals that have rocked religious broadcasting in recent weeks. In the shadow of all the fun humorists and skeptical columnists have had at the expense of some of the stars of the electric church, the woes of religious broadcasters are no laughing matter. Three national public opinion polls conducted last week point to anger and disillusionment with the video vicarage. Those televangelists most directly involved are most badly damaged.

After years of moaning about "conspiracies" against them, conservative activists finally have real evidence to take before the court of public opinion. Meaning, of course, last week's revelation that the Internal Revenue Service has been giving extra scrutiny to groups with the words tea party or patriot in their names. Extra scrutiny from the IRS is about as welcome as extra scrutiny from the proctologist, so one can hardly blame conservative groups for complaining, as they've done since last year.

SO FAR THIS WEEK, President Obama has been called potentially "worse than Nixon" on freedom of the press issues, been accused of running an administration guilty of "outrageous, totally inexcusable" conduct, and has endured calls for the proverbial head of his handpicked attorney general, Eric Holder. Rush Limbaugh's at it again? Not exactly. During arguably the worst news cycle of his 52 months in the Oval Office, Obama suffered those verbal broadsides from liberal commentators and journalists such as the lawyer in the 1971 Pentagon Papers leak case and from Carl Bernstein, the reporter who helped break open Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Benghazi scandal. The scandal is that Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) and some Republican colleagues are dishonoring the memory of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans by making a political circus out of their deaths. As chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Issa is ready to manipulate the pain and anger of relatives and colleagues of the victims, but shows little interest in making U.S. diplomats safer. The hearing he held last week ignored the real issues raised by Benghazi in favor of promoting conspiracy theories about "talking points" that administration officials used after the tragedy.

Elle magazine has declared Kerry Washington a bona fide star and an A-list celebrity! Finally! The 36-year-old Scandal beauty graces the June cover. Kerry tells the mag she didn't initially plan to go into acting. "I imagined I'd be a clinical psychologist, with a focus on how performance shapes identity," says Kerry, who did a double major, in sociology and anthropology, at George Washington University. "I'd figure out ways to use role-playing in the healing of people.

TRENTON - The costs of a scandal in the Rutgers University men's basketball program will not be pushed onto students through tuition increases, and the university is trying to come up with a fair formula to allocate state aid among its three campuses, the school's president told lawmakers Monday. President Robert Barchi faced questions on both issues when he appeared with other education officials at a state Senate budget hearing. Senators asked about the financial implications from Mike Rice's firing as basketball coach last month after a video was made public showing the coach pushing and kicking players and using antigay slurs as he berated them during practice.

ABC's sultry prime-time hit Scandal is a quick-paced drama starring Kerry Washington as high-powered crisis manager Olivia Pope. Pope, a no-nonsense-yet-emotionally vulnerable black woman, is having a steamy affair with the white Republican president of the United States, Fitzgerald "Fitz" Grant, played by the guy you'll remember as the baddie from Ghost, Tony Goldwyn. It's crazy, it's dizzying, and we love it. Scandal's success this season - it ranks a strong second in its 10 p.m. time slot in total viewers ages 18 to 49 - is more than confirmation that America loves a good nighttime soap.

The Rutgers University basketball scandal that caused a national frenzy two weeks ago appears to be having little long-term effect on the school's reputation, a new poll finds. The vast majority of respondents agreed with the decision to fire head men's basketball coach Mike Rice, who was seen in video footage manhandling players, using antigay slurs, and throwing basketballs at or toward players. That behavior, 93 percent of respondents said, was not acceptable. However, a slight majority said the behavior exhibited by Rice is either "very" or "fairly common.

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - Rutgers University's board of governors resumed talks of mergers and strategic plans Thursday as the school attempted to move beyond the controversy over the firing of basketball coach Mike Rice. The board's first meeting since ESPN reported on Rice's physical and verbal abuse of players focused on the university's future, including the pending absorption of the University of Medicine and Denistry of New Jersey. But the Rice fallout lingered. The governors pledged a thorough, independent investigation; players begged for normalcy; and president Robert L. Barchi created a diversity office.

THERE WILL be no more masses, no nervous couples to wed or babies to baptize, and no more white collars against a simple black suit for three Archdiocese of Philadelphia priests implicated in sexual-abuse scandals. In a statement released Sunday, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput said the Rev. Joseph J. Gallagher, 78, and the Rev. Mark S. Gaspar, 43, will have no further public ministry in the Archdiocese "due to substantiated violations of The Standards of Ministerial Behaviors and Boundaries.