Cavuto: Open up the investigations, shut down the 'gates'

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Cavuto: Open up the investigations, shut down the 'gates'

Time to focus on the facts of a scandal

Don't look now, but we have our latest "gate."

Now, I don't know where this "bridge-gate" swings, I do know that it won't be swinging long before another "gate" starts swinging.

That's the thing about gates.

Ever since Watergate, they just keep gating along.

But at least Watergate made sense because Watergate was a real place.

It was a scandal based on a break-in at the Watergate Complex in Washington, D.C.

All these other gates?

Watergate-wannabe-gates.

And I say it's got to stop. If for no other reason, than a lot of these "gates" exactly roll off the tongue.

Even when they kind of make sense.

Like Iran-gate, when the media was looking into the Reagan administration selling weapons to Iran then diverting the proceeds to contra rebels in Nicaragua.

Or Monicagate, when it was exploring Monica Lewinsky.

And her relationship with a certain U.S. president.

Then there was Memogate when the media was actually covering the media.

And the scandal over a forged memo about George W. Bush's military record that ultimately cost Dan Rather his job.

But sometimes these gates get silly.

Like "Horse-gate" involving last year's meat scare in which horse meat was found in some frozen meat products.

Or "selfie-gate", last month's fixation over President Obama's famous selfie at Nelson Mandela's funeral.

Or "porn-gate" when the media was looking into charges SEC investigators were too busy looking at porn to bother looking at this guy Bernie Madoff.

And don't even get me started on all these foreign gates.

South Africa had its Muldergate, but at least that one was named after a very real defense minister Connie Mulder, charged with diverting funds.

Or Canada's "Pastagate," perhaps one of the dumbest gates of all gate-dom. The Montreal government cracking down on an Italian restaurant for using words that didn't comply with Quebec's language laws. What were those words--calamari and pasta.

I kid you not.

Talk about cooking up a gate.

How about we close all of these gates?

Not the scandals. The gates to which we attach these scandals.

We instantly trivialize them when we do that. It's like "soap-opera-izing" them, throwing the same stupid suffix on all of them failing to distinguish them. And then I think we in the media fail to distinguish ourselves.

We can do better.

Because there's a big difference between a governor's staff creating a traffic jam.

And Richard Nixon creating something that resembles a constitutional jam.

I say, open up the investigations.

And shut down the gates.

And let us only show the facts that swing from there.