June 08, 2005

Sorry I haven't posted about the whole "Deep Throat" phenomenon until now, but it so disgusted me that it was hard to gather my thoughts to post about it!
Here, George Neumayr of the American Spectator enumerates several of the many reasons it bothered him, too:
The Watergate Channel

[...]
The old media seem almost ready to launch a Watergate channel to compete with the History-Hitler channel. It grates on these journalists that few Americans are aware of their self-described heroics. And these journalists are capable of sputtering rage when they discover that those who bother to examine the details of their fabled anti-Nixon reporting think that it looks more and more like the journalistic quiltwork of a Jayson Blair. By the standards of today -- where reporters are getting sacked for fiddling around with datelines and lifting quotes from other papers -- the Watergate reporting looks quite outre. It was cobbled together pretty dishonestly, involving corner-cutting and lying that had moral stakes far higher than an indolent reporter filing a story from his apartment.

Yet the Columbia Journalism School-style minders, who pride themselves on being primly hostile to journalistic corner-cutting, seemed to have gone on summer break last week. Where were the Bernard Kalbs knitting their brows over the dubious methods and devices Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein used to advance their story? The mainstream media that spent the 1990s lecturing conservatives on the dangers of willy-nilly means, even against obviously craven and corrupt subjects, all of a sudden accepted that the noble end of nailing a president did justify low means.
[Of course, Neumayr is talking about Clinton and his apologists.--Jen]

The media was back to Dan Rather's "core truth" rationale for using a forgery against George Bush. Come on, Nixon was an evil guy, the fashionable attitude went last week. So what if to get at that core truth required lying and lawbreaking? Carl Bernstein, who had ludicrously tried to set himself up in the 1990s as a media ethicist of sorts, allowed himself defenses he never granted Clinton's critics. Don't shoot the messenger just because you don't like the means by which the message is delivered, he instructed Americans last week.

It is no wonder that students studying ethics at Catonsville High School find all of this to be empty noise or tedious posturing. Ironically, what the Watergate nostalgia is teaching them, to the extent they are paying attention, is not so much that Nixon was a criminal but that crimes were committed in the drive to prove it. Now when they hear of the "cancer" of Watergate, they ask which side had it.

I believe that the MSM drug Mr. Felt, the infamous "Deep Throat," out of the seclusion of his golden years last week for a variety of self-serving reasons.
(And yes, I think the media "outed" Felt and that Felt didn't out himself because he needed to make money on the story.
Why should he hobble to the mikes on his walker now that he's 91, after he's kept quiet all these years?
WoodStein were allowed to disclose the name after Felt's death, which shouldn't be far from now in the future, so why couldn't they wait a little longer?)
The MSM/DNC were desperate to produce a story from an "anonymous source" that made them look like the good guys in the wake of the Isikoff/Newsweek Koran Flushing debacle, hence the production of Felt and the revival of the "heroism" of reporting the Watergate story.
Never forget that the WashedUpPost, enabler of Woodstein, is in the same media conglomerate as Newsweek.
Worse still, the uncovering of Deep Throat's role revealed to us all the true nastiness and criminality, not of Nixon and his underlings, but of Felt and Woodstein.
Felt could have and should have kept his oath of loyalty and confidentiality to the FBI and reported any presidential "abuses of power" through the proper channels.
You've gotta wonder if he'd done this, whether Nixon would have been found guilty of anything...
I'm convinced that the only bad thing "Tricky" Dick did was to expose Alger Hiss as a Communist spy, a "crime" for which the Left will never forgive him.
Watergate was nothing but a bloodless coup of a hugely popularly re-elected [GOP] President.
What's really interesting about the Felt story is that the Leftist MSM was willing to overlook Felt's real crime as the 2nd in command of the FBI during the '70's of ordering unauthorized break-ins in the homes of the anarchist anti-war Weather Underground, another pet group of the Left.
So, they forgave Felt one type of unauthorized break-in to depose a President for allegedly covering up over another type?
To this day, no-one is really sure why the Watergate "burglars" were breaking into the DNC's Watergate HQ...and Gordon Liddy's not telling!
There's another "bonus" to the Leftist Dims from doing this story now: they wanted to put President Bush on notice that they want to bring him down, too.
Oooooh...and we're so afraid of them. NOT.
John Kerry, who served in Vietnam and made "D's" at Yale, is babbling about impeaching Bush
(Check out Al-Jazeer's excited version of that story!).
I am happy to report that most of the American people don't see Felt or Woodstein as heroes, don't remember or understand what was so awful about Nixon's presidency (because, aside from wage/price controls and setting up the EPA, he was a very good President) and why it had to be prematurely ended and realize now, in the wake of the recently exposed stories the lying MSM has tried to foist on the American public, that Watergate was the most egregious example of Old Media leading us all around by the nose to do their bidding.
As they could have anticipated, had they not been crazed by resentment and rage, this story--like Koran-gate, Rathergate, Abu Ghraib-"gate" and EasonJordan-"gate--has backfired on them again.
Thank the Lord that, unlike back in the 1970's, we have New Media to turn to for our news and views and aren't completely reliant on Leftist idealogues with an agenda like Woodward, Bernstein and Felt to depose a duly elected Commander in Chief under the cloak of fulfilling our supposed "right to know" about abuse of powers in the Oval Office.
FWIW, we have their dismissive views on the record regarding real presidential abuse of power when Clinton, who wasn't "acquitted" as he maintains, was impeached for that.
President Nixon should have made Congress impeach him (and I'm not very sure they would have succeeded in doing so), but unlike Bill Clinton, he cared about what it would do the country.
God rest him. And I'm grateful that the release of the Venona Papers exonerated him.