This was, of course, a golden opportunity for the entire anti-Nixonian Washington establishment to pretend as if 'deep throat' was a real person.
Felt's age and possibly mental fitness, as Andrea Mitchell rightly points out are factors in the 'now or never' revelation agreed upon with serendipity just yesterday, even though Felt has been ruled out for years from the list of candidates, because he doesn't correlate in too many important details, accounts and characteristics with the 'deep' character of the story.
Can there be any doubt now that the WP was wrong in running the story ?
Responsible journalists cannot run a story aimed at taking down a President on one anonymous source. the Post not only ran it they virtually created an election year scandal by fiat. Then when Nixon won 49 States the Post was only too eager to override that vote.
Nixon was right; there was one standard for Democrats, one for Republicans and one for him. Still he remains one of the single most important Presidents ever. We'd still be in Vietnam ( a democrat war if ever there was one, as Sen. Dole rightly commented ) if not for Richard Nixon.
I also feel that there has been an obvious betrayal of the presumed conditions of anonymity for this Source since Woodward and Bernstein were clear that the Source would be revealed, after his demise. Recently they even broke the story that he was 'near death'.
These important facts do not add up.
At the 1997 Convention of the Nationalist Party, an offshoot of Buchananist Republicanism and T. Roosevelt's 'Bullmoose' Progressivism, I gave a policy address where I affirmed my belief that the entire Watergate epic of the leftist Washington Media elite was based on several important points, many of which were fictional, all part of a retribution spreading all the way back to Alger Hiss and also the 'bought' election of 1960.
This I traced as an important step in the evolution of the GOP into the lesser creature it had become. Then in the aftermath of the Gingrich revolution, many of us were passionate about a return to the idealism of the Eisenhower GOP based on reintroduction of the important planks which the Nationalist Party promulgated.