Posted on 06/02/2005 9:15:21 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Mark Felt's emergence as Deep Throat has occasioned a prolonged Old Timer's Day of the American left, allowing various aging fakers to take one last, long victory lap. With relish they have renewed their intense moralizing about Richard Nixon even though their own ethics evaporated a long time ago. We overthrew a corrupt order, they in effect say by puffing themselves up -- an arrogance that would be more comprehensible if they hadn't proceeded to create a new corrupt order. The champions of Deep Throat built atop the ruins of Richard Nixon not a better culture but a base culture that would culminate in the Deep Throat presidency of Bill Clinton.
The glib use of the Deep Throat moniker by the establishment buoying Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein was itself a signal of the new corruption: one form of crassness had been replaced by a more chic crassness. And that crassness -- at once willing to wallow in scandal in the popular culture and conduct puritanical political purges against select reviled figures -- would masquerade as morality for years until it exploded in the liberals' complicity in the very lies, perjury, and obstruction of justice that they spent their youth decrying.
The destroyers of Nixon ended up his disciples. Disciples not of his ends but of his means. An accidental admission of this came when Bill Clinton offered an almost gaudy eulogy at Nixon's funeral. Of course, Nixon's critics furiously deny any resemblance to the low ethics they once opposed and insist that whatever low means they have employed can be chalked up to necessity. (Mark Felt had to break the law, they have said this week). How dare Chuck Colson and Pat Buchanan lecture Felt and his enablers on morality, Ben Bradlee practically thundered on Wednesday's Nightline to an ingratiating Ted Koppel.
Why can't they question the propriety of it? Ben Bradlee is hardly a credible scourge of corruption in the presidency. He was John F. Kennedy's see-no-evil boon companion, whose sister-in-law, a JFK mistress, was murdered mysteriously, a scandal Bradlee was willing to cover-up by helping to destroy her diary detailing the affair.
On Thursday morning in the newspaper of this friend of JFK, a president with ties to Mobsters, appeared a Bob Woodward story that contained a casual reference to Nixon's circle as "Nazis," according to Mark Felt's estimate. This was a revealing excess in Woodward's story: In the left's feverish, self-justifying nostalgia, Nixon has to be turned into a Nazi for its hysteria to make any sense.
Not mentioned, by the way, in any of the motive-measuring pieces on Deep Throat is discussion of any of the motives driving the Washington Post's coverage. Why did Ben Bradlee give two cub reporters investigative carte blanche against the Nixon White House? One motive was Bradlee's apoplexy over what he believed to be Nixon's attempt to put the kibosh on the Post company's application for broadcasting licenses. Just as Bradlee covered for Kennedy out of personal support, so he exposed Nixon out of personal hatred.
And to destroy Nixon required imitating him. The liberal posse would catch this lawbreaker by breaking laws themselves. They would expose his lies through their own. Somehow Nixon's ends-justify-the-means thinking was unfathomably evil, but their own perfectly justified. I recently asked Herb Meyer, an aide to former CIA director William Casey, about Bob Woodward's trustworthiness. Woodward had interviewed Meyer at length for his book on the CIA, Veil. Meyer's response to my question: "Everything Woodward put in his book about me is wrong."
The radical chic culture that upended Nixon encouraged making stuff up for the cause. The lies and lawbreaking the radicals would accuse Nixon of was always on display in their own conduct. The radicals, both high and low, in Georgetown with the Ben Bradlees and at protests with the bombthrowers, didn't object to Nixon's means; they shared them. What they objected to was his ends, and once they thwarted them they unveiled their own ends which proved calamitous, advancing a nihilistic culture in which the only approved oracles of wisdom go by such noble names as Deep Throat.
Very good column, highly recommended!
George Neumayr Ping
uhm...refresh my memory on THIS one!!!!
Nixon did nothing that Kennedy didn't do and many if not most Presidents before him had done, except try and cover his ass, instead of stating the fact that he was doing his duty as commander and chief to protect this country from all enemies both foreign and domestic which he was afraid had infiltrated the democratic party (which they had).
Wasn't it in 'Veil' that Woodward wrote about Casey whispering some deathbed confession in his ear? (Woodward has so little credibility I don't even remember what the dirt was.)
So much about ‘Deep Throat’, he was a small player in the over all plan. He and the media were used as chess pieces for a larger game. ‘The Amendment’ by John Fitzgerald there is a lot more to the story. The theory behind the facts is amazing and really does leave you wondering, what really happen. This book is the 'Da Vinci Code' of American politics.
Yes, there was a supposed deathbed interview with Casey in the hospital, under circumstances that a variety of others claims was quite impossible: security around Casey's room was much tighter than Woodward described and multi-layered, so that Woodward couldn't have just waltzed in flashing his press badge as he claimed, and Casey was said to have been beyond any verbal speech at that point in his illness, but he suddenly spoke up for Woodward.
One of the most telling quotes in this article:
"The champions of Deep Throat built atop the ruins of Richard Nixon not a better culture but a base culture that would culminate in the Deep Throat presidency of Bill Clinton."
That's the perfect phrase: the Deep Throat presidency of Bill Clinton!
‘The Amendment’ by John Fitzgerald.
Thanks for the tip. I shall give it a try.
Woodward's claim went beyond the realm of preposterous and right into 'laughable' territory.
excellent post...thanks!
And when Bradlee goes to her garage apartment to find the diary, who do you think he ran into, also in the apartment, trying to find the diary?
One James Angleton.
Whatever his background, whatever his connections, one cannot trust what Woodward says as fact. Take, for instance, his account in Veil of his last interview with dying CIA Director William Casey. Havill tracked down Casey's family, friends, hospital security staff and CIA guardians and found that the visit Woodward described was impossible. First of all, Casey was under 24 hour guard by several layers of security: CIA members, hospital security, and Casey's family. And Woodward had already been stopped once while trying to see Casey. According to one of Havill's sources, Woodward was not merely asked to leave, as Woodward reported in his book, but was forcibly shoved into the elevator. And Woodward's story kept shifting. Woodward told a Knight-Ridder reporter that he had gotten in by flashing his press pass. To Larry King, Woodward claimed he just "walked in." But even assuming he somehow managed to get by all of that security, Woodward would still have been the only person to claim that Casey had uttered intelligible words in those last hours. The only other person to make such a claim was Robert Gates, who himself became CIA Director. The family, doctor and medical staff said Casey could not make words at this point, only noises. At least Gates questioned whether he might have been imagining he heard words. Woodward has never retracted his "conversation." In addition, Woodward once said that Casey sat bolt upright, which would seem highly implausible given his rapidly deteriorating state. Onetime CIA Director Stansfield Turner, a friend of Woodward's since 1966, said Woodward told him he'd walked by Casey's room and Casey had waved to him. Casey's bed was positioned in such a way in the room as to make that impossible too.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
Excellent. Thanks for posting it for us to read.
Below is an interesting thread by John Robinson. Besides John's premise some great data came out in replies on the thread.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1415502/posts
What Everybody's Missing About Deep Throat (He Would Have Buried Watergate)
Self | June 2, 2005 | JohnRobertson
Posted on 06/02/2005 8:21:22 PM PDT by John Robertson
While many MSM'ers (sorry, most) are lionizing this guy as "a hero," someone who "did what he had to do," something big is being missed.
Our side has pointed out that he authorized/engineered illegal breakins himself...
And that he turned on the Whitehouse because he didn't get the top FBI job. Now think about that....
Felt became a snitch because he didn't get something he wanted! He was an opportunist, plain and simple (and it runs in the family, apparently, as they shamelessly say they urged the old man to do it so they could all get some money). Yeah, a real hero.
But here's what I haven't seen....
If they had made him the head of the FBI, he WOULD NOT have turned on the Whitehouse.
In fact, as head of the FBI....
HE WOULD HAVE HELPED THEM BURY WATERGATE!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1415502/posts
I think that the left jumped the shark with Watergate.
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