What would summer be without a good season of novels to enjoy at the beach, on the porch, or just in bed under a summer fan?

And wouldn’t summer be less without concerts in the park, picnics near the water, and swimming in the heat?

Likewise, in politics, where summers are ripe for the lightweight effort to latch onto a good gossip topic, is not the world a better place with a scandal to add to a party, a picnic, a drink at the local watering hole?

And there are a few scandalous and funny news items to enjoy, like Anthony Weiner’s online exploits so perfectly suited to mockery and outright laughter, or the Mayor of San Diego, Bob Finer, a perfectly lecherous guy who just can’t discover what is wrong with grabbing, touching, or propositioning anyone of the opposite sex.

But where are the good political scandals this summer, the kind that keeps you watching for the latest tidbit or scintilla of detail?

There simply are none.

To be fair, what constitutes a truly good scandal in politics is which party is suspected with its egregious behavior, and which party you support.

Some Republicans still think the Watergate scandal was no big deal but that Bill Clinton’s exploits with Ms. Lewinsky was worthy of impeachment.

Democrats mostly view those two events in opposite terms.

So this year, with a Democrat in the White House the best scandals should be about things that are either sexy or suspicious. Problem is the Obamas have offered up nothing remotely sexy in the administration in its fifth year, and little that rise to the occasion of suspicion, as in “cover-up.”

It is, after all, usually not the action but the intent to cover the event in secrecy that generates the best material of a political scandal.

And, to be fair, if you are a strong Republican, this summer you want to feel somewhat let down by your elected representatives for not finding the real cover up to several scandals that seemed to have perfectly good potential to get down to the real “dirt.”

In the spring it looked like a great possibility of scandal choices. There was IRS gate; the Associated Press under attack by the Justice Department; the lively and endless hearings on Benghazi; and the dim recall of the once thriving ATF scandal in Texas that resulted in phase two of an arms investigations gone bad.

But, though Darrell Issa and others did their very best to give us something, anything, to have for our summer scandal, they frankly let us down. Not a single indictment, not a bare proven article of anything more than mistakes and incompetence, and not a bread crumb worth of trail to the White House was discovered.

Really?

A full handful of scandals and not a single mea culpa? And this is it for the rest of the summer?

Maybe we have to do what we did last summer and the summer before — turn to political fiction or, as the far right in politics prefers, the Internet authors of the fake and the false.

At least they make outrageous claims.

 

Jim Crawford is a retired educator and political enthusiast living here in the Tri-State.