In its early report on the death of John Profumo, the Conservative War Minister whose liaison with Christine Keeler—who was also sleeping with a Russian intelligence officer—rocked British politics in 1963, the Times of London noted that at first the press had not played up the story. “With a discretion that now seems astonishing,” wrote Jenny Bootha and Simon Freeman, “the newspapers to whom Ms. Keeler sold her story held back from publishing details.” It was a reminder of how much scandal itself has changed in the last forty-three years. So, in a different way, was The New York Times’s headline to an Associated Press story about Profumo’s passing: “John Profumo, Scandal-Plagued Briton, Dies at 91.” Why do I think there’s something wrong, something anachronistic about that epithet? Profumo wasn’t a scandal-plagued Briton. Back in those days you were either involved in a scandal or you weren’t, but you couldn’t be “scandal-plagued” in the way that the Republican party and President Bush—and, indeed, perhaps all American presidents—now are. They are “scandal-plagued” because whatever they may have done or not done, they are victims of our new media culture and its need to meet the demand for scandal with repeated and often far-fetched attempts to find something scandalous about them.

As a result, when something genuinely scandalous comes along, like the Abramoff affair, it tends to get lost in the shuffle. Concurrently with the news of Jack Abramoff’s bribes to congressmen—which the Democrats have been desperate to link