Scrapbook

...In other words, according to Dr...

...The Scrapbook has often wondered who, in their right mind, would ever fall for such a crude, obvious— even laughable—scheme...

...Not long ago, you may recall, Reed's consulting company took more than $4.2 million from Abramoff—a longtime friend—to help shut down casinos that weren't clients of Abramoff's...

...Last week, when two reporters for the AtlantaJournal-Constitution asked Reed's campaign manager if Gingrich has endorsed Reed, the reporters were told to ask Gingrich's spokesman...

...But Dr...

...Which is where things get interesting...

...The political scandal, after all, was about national security, not extramarital sex...

...Which prompts us to ponder the wondrous sense of irony possessed by the gods...

...The details of the Profumo Affair are well known, and have been the subject of innumerable books and a popular movie, Scandal (1989), where the part of John Profumo was played by Sir Ian McKellen...

...Show Biz Update When George Clooney accepted his Oscar for best actor in a supporting role earlier this month, he mentioned that "we are a little bit out of touch in Hollywood every once in a while...

...It was the same message that Gingrich, in the months since Abramoff's plea agreement, has told audiences across the country: The GOP, in the wake of scandals, must return to its reformist, anti-establishment roots...

...But as Dr...

...According to the National White Collar Crime Center, very few Americans do, and the median reported loss for the unfortunate handful is $5,000...

...For this is the same Dr...

...I think it's probably a good thing...

...In the midst of all the self-congratulatory back-patting, he omitted one relevant detail: McDaniel and her guest were forced to sit by themselves during the ceremony—in the back of the hall...

...Think what you will about the late Ronald Reagan, he never bet the ship of state on a self-evident con, and in foreign affairs, he was never outfoxed or stolen blind by the likes of the favorite nephew or grieving widow of a former Deputy Assistant Sub-Minister of Finance in Evelyn Waugh's Azania...

...Gottschalk's son, who is also a physician, has petitioned the Orange County Superior Court to remove his father as administrator of the $8 million Gottschalk family partnership...

...In 1995, at her 70th birthday dinner, Margaret Thatcher, who had invited John Profumo to attend, sat him next to Queen Elizabeth, and pronounced him "one of our national heroes...

...On January 4, for example, he told CBS's Bob Schieffer that "the Abramoff scandal is the latest signal of just how unhealthy and how dysfunctional Washington, D.C., has become...

...Con Job THE SCRAPBOOK'S manners are impeccable, as readers are aware, and we would never, ever, under any circumstances, make light of anybody's personal or medical distress for the sake of putting things in historic perspective...

...Second, once he had confessed wrongdoing, apologized to the House of Commons, and resigned his seat, Profumo turned up a few days later at Toynbee Hall, a charitable institution serving the poor and disadvantaged in London's East End, asking to help clean up...

...Nor would he ever have stooped to accuse his critics of mental illness...

...Gottschalk has lost an estimated $3 million of his family's assets to Nigerian Internet scams...

...This Academy, this group of people, gave Hattie McDaniel an Oscar in 1939 when blacks were still sitting in the backs of theaters...

...Sure it does...

...We repeat that credo to ourselves, periodically, as a matter of principle...

...Scrapbook would say: The cognitive impairment of Louis Gott-schalk's savings account has shown a significant increase...

...The reason...

...but at a later date, he confessed that he had misled his colleagues in Parliament, and resigned his office and seat...

...The Abramoff lucre, and Reed's less-than-forthright public statements about his work in behalf of Abramoff's casino clients, has become an issue in the Georgia primary...

...When the subject was raised in the House of Commons, Profumo declared that there was "no impropriety" in his relations with Miss Keeler...

...Gottschalk is one of the few, and over the course of a decade, his $3 million deficit has probably set some sort of record in the Nigerian Internet sweepstakes...

...But what is it saying...

...It would be an overstatement to say that the Profumo Affair, which exploded in the late spring and summer of 1963, brought down Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who quit that October on grounds of ill health...

...Generous Americans are invited to respond with pertinent details about their own bank accounts, where their new African pen pals will wire the money and offer a substantial cut of the windfall as a reward...

...Louis A. Gottschalk, founding chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the University of California at Irvine...

...Gingrich's spokesman, who previously has denied that the former speaker has endorsed Reed, told the reporters that the "release speaks for itself...

...But two observations about the case deserve to be made now that Profumo has died...

...No self-pitying memoir, no public recrimination, no ex post facto justification, no testing the electoral waters, not even a slot on a TV reality show...

...On March 3, however, Ralph Reed, who is running to win the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor of Georgia—the primary is July 18—sent out a press release touting a fundraiser his campaign had held the week before...

...Furthermore, Gingrich said, "Having Ralph as lieutenant governor would be an extraordinary asset here, but also across the whole country...

...First, a thorough investigation revealed that Profumo, who had served bravely and gallantly in the Second World War, never shared confidences about matters of state with Keeler that she might have passed on to the Soviet naval attach...

...It seems that Dr...

...but it is fair to say that it severely injured his government and the Conservative party, which narrowly lost the next year's general election...

...Louis Gottschalk who, in 1987, reported to the world that his study of Ronald Reagan's speech patterns in the 1980 and 1984 presidential debates revealed that Reagan's "cognitive impairment scores taken over time . . . showed a significant increase...

...For the next four decades he deployed his considerable skills to raise funds and dramatically expand Toyn-bee Hall's social services while remaining resolutely silent about the events which had ended his promising political career...

...on another matter, we couldn't help noticing a sad story in the Los Angeles Times about Dr...

...Readers with email will know about those delightfully incoherent letters, usually from the relative of a mythical cabinet minister of some West African regime, who has been entrusted with vast sums of money but needs a safe place overseas to deposit the cash...

...Profumo, as readers of a certain age will recall, was the British secretary of state for war who carried on an affair with a winsome young woman named Christine Keeler who, as it turned out, was spending quality time with a list of prominent personalities in London—including the Soviet naval attach...

...The Limits of Reform In January, when the lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty, in two separate investigations, to five counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, and mail fraud, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich issued calls for reform...

...According to the release, the featured speaker at the fundraiser was none other than . . . Newt Gingrich, who told the audience that Reed "has the kind of talent, he has the ability to think strategically and to work operationally to make things happen...

...Over the past 10 years, the senior Dr...

...Just the quiet, and immensely dignified, determination to redeem himself for conduct that, to contemporary eyes, must look comparatively benign...

...Gottschalk, not only was President Reagan a bad president, but a senile one as well...