Some Final Words on "Deep Throat"

Did Mark Felt do his country a great favor by spilling the beans on the lying and corrupt Nixon administration? The answer to that is a resounding yes. Was he a hero? This question is a bit more complicated as it depends on his motives which will probably never be known. The fact that there are many similarities between the Nixon and Bush administrations is pointed out by David Broder in his column today, Antidote To Secrecy. We don't know if there have been any "Deep Throats" in the Bush administration because the reality is the Washington Post and the Woodward and Bernstein of then do not exist now. Even if there is a modern day Deep Throat or two there are no reporters or newspapers willing to go out on a limb to bring the truth to light. This has become fairly obvious with the release of the Downing Street Memo. It has been largely ignored by the corporate media in spite of the fact that it's authenticity has not been questioned and it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the President of the United States and his administration consistently lied about the Iraq war. This is the very same corporate media that had front page stories on a president lying about having oral sex in the White House. This may be getting trite but remains true:

No body died because Clinton lied.

The same people who were quick to elevate Linda Tripp to hero status are just a quick to label Mark Felt a traitor. As Broder explains:

Chuck Colson, Nixon's special counsel, who was jailed for his part in the criminal conspiracy hatched in the Oval Office, told NBC's "Today" show that he was "in a state of shock" at learning it was Felt, because "I never thought anybody in such a position of sensitivity in the Justice Department would breach confidences."

Pat Buchanan, who sharpened his rhetorical claws as a Nixon speechwriter, told "Today's" Matt Lauer, "There's nothing heroic about breaking faith with your people, breaking the law, sneaking around in garages, putting stuff from an investigation out to a Nixon-hating Washington Post."

Colson added that Felt "broke the confidence of the president of the United States. If you're a president of the United States, you've got to have somebody in the FBI you can talk to with the confidence you talk to a priest."

And Buchanan threw in the extraordinary assertion that "what he did was help destroy an enormously popular president and, partly as a consequence of that, what 58,000 Americans died for in Vietnam was poured down the sewer."

In these comments, Americans born in the 1970s, '80s and '90s can learn everything they need to know about the dangerous delusions of the Nixon era. The mind-set that created enemies lists, the blind loyalty to a deeply flawed individual, the twisting of historical fact to turn villains into heroes and heroes into villains -- they are all there.

Read that last paragraph again; "the blind loyalty to a deeply flawed individual, the twisting of historical fact to turn villains into heroes and heroes into villains -- they are all there." And they are all here once again only this time, although we may have some Deep Throats, we don't have brave journalists to follow up on their revelations.

Update
PSoDT reports that Tim (Bobblehead) Russert brought up The Downing Street Memo this morning and when the Chairman of the Republican Party, Ken Mehlman, claimed it had been discredited Tiny Tim actually called him on it.

MR. RUSSERT: I don't believe that the authenticity of this report has been discredited.

When you've lost Tiny Tim you may be in trouble.

Update-2
Joe Gandelman talks about the Broder commentary.