It was Tiger, and Tiger was it, and no one was to worry about the details behind the mutually advantageous image-mongering. We keep being fooled by leaders in all sectors of American life, over and over.
– The small group of friends who make up Tiger Woods' inner circle warned the golfer his extramarital shenanigans were going to cause trouble, but he ignored them—and they've stuck with him through the explosive revelations that are threatening to sink his career. "We said, 'You've got to be careful. It's really getting too raggedy,'" a longtime friend tells the New York Daily News. "He was under a lot of pressure. He thought he was just letting off steam." Meanwhile, Frank Rich argues in the New York Times that Woods, not Ben Bernanke, is the person of the year. True, "Woods will surely be back on the links once the next celebrity scandal drowns his out." But Tiger is a symbol of Americans' "bipartisan credulousness," a quality that let fans fall into "the exceptional, Enron-sized gap between this golfer’s public image as a paragon of businesslike discipline and focus and the maniacally reckless life we now know he led."