2403 Gategate

When all the controversy came out about the New England Patriots deflating their balls it was funny to see all the brouhaha about it.  Especially the attempts by the media to name the affair.

One group tried to call it Ballghazi.  That's a little much.  The Benghazi scandal involved loss of lives.  I think you trivialize it by using the -Ghazi suffix for anything else. 

Deflategate was better.  Because naturally the "-gate" thing came up right away.  Gate is the go-to suffix for scandals ever since the first -gate of the Nixon years, Watergate.

In fact, there are so many "-gate" names that Wikipedia has a whole page dedicated to them.  They range from Nannygate, the controversy when Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood were nominated for office and it was revealed they'd hired illegal immigrants for house help, to Troopergate 3, when Sarah Palin fired a commissioner for not following her demand to fire her brother-in-law, a state trooper. 

Troopergate 1, in case you're interested, was when Arkansas State troopers said they had arranged sexual liaisons for then governor Bill Clinton.  

Then there was fajitagate, when three off duty San Francisco police officers allegedly assaulted civilians over a bag of steak fajitas, which were mistaken as drugs.  And who can forget donglegate, which caused two people to be fired and triggered a DDoS attack following a double entendre on the word dongle being overhead at a programmers convention. 

As my colleague Bob pointed out, it's funny we use the "-gate" suffix for every scandal, because the first one, Watergate, actually involved no water. 

BTW, this is Bill Belichick's second "-gate."  He went through spygate in 2007 when he cheated by videotaping defensive signals during a game. 

Like Bill Clinton, I'm sure he learned his lesson. 

America, ya gotta love it.