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THROAT NAMED
The Washington Post confirms that former senior FBI figure W. Mark Felt is Nixon nemesis Deep Throat (writes Alan R.M. Jones: “I was so hoping it was Henry”).
Republican Mark Coffey salutes an American hero.
Hero, my ass. This guy was a vindictive f***ing traitor. He accomplished nothing but hobbling the Republican Party for years and thereby crippling the nation.
What f***ing difference would it have made had Nixon gotten away with the cover-up? Not a damned bit, at least none in the negative sense. It was a tiny issue related to Nixon’s paranoia that had no impact on ANY NATIONAL ISSUE.
Coffey’s spin is diametrically wrong-headed. All of the alleged negative impact of the “crime” would have been naught had either Deep Throat shut his mouth or had Nixon burned the tapes and said “blow me.” Nothing was gained when this rat squealed.
If I were Felt, I’d check under my bed and in my closets for G. Gordon Liddy.
DrZin, with all due respect, you’re the one who has it all wrong. You seem to be blaming Felt for NIXON’s criminal activity. Nixon authorized break-ins, stonewalled investigations by law enforcement, singled out opponents for retribution…and I STILL said he’s a great man. Even great men have to obey the law…America is a Republic, not a dictatorship.
Posted by Mark Coffey on 2005 05 31 at 10:55 PM • permalinkLook, I’m as right-wing as anyone on this site, but Nixon was not a great President. We’re talking about the guy who imposed price and wage controls, created the EPA, conducted detante with the Soviets, institutionalized affirmative action, etc.
That’s on top of the rampant dishonesty involved in Watergate. Good riddance.
“Even great men have to obey the law…America is a Republic, not a dictatorship.” That should also apply to Mr. Felt. He was a political appointee but at the Justice Department. A Nixon Administration official went to federal prison for revealing portions of one FBI file. This guy gushed confidential information in the midst of a criminal investigation. Moral relativism is not the best game in town.
DrZin-go take your meds.Re #7
Therein lies the moral dilemma. Is it wrong to break the law (perhaps in a harmless way) to ensure that far more heinous criminality is uncovered, its effects corrected if possible and the perpetrators punished?
If we create a society where the punishments for whistleblowing are such that no-one will ever reveal criminality at the highest levels of government, then we lessen our protections against totalitarianism.
Felt, I presume, did break the law. His ‘punishment’ should be (and probably will be) to go down in history as a courageous, patriotic man who served his nation very well.
Powerline has a must see post on this, a revisit to Epstein’s fairly prophetic idea that it was Felt or someone in the Bureau and that Nixon was hardly the point in the first place.
One of the worst things about Watergate is that it bears alot of responsibilty for the lefty-dreamworld of today’s journalists. “Us journalist lovers of truth and freedom against the evil right-wing conspiracy, bent on world domination.”
Posted by zeppenwolf on 2005 05 31 at 11:38 PM • permalinkIs the FBI allowed to bring the government down?
The fact that he did all of this anonymously without putting his name to anything,while he kept picking up his pay-check,(from said government)makes me wonder.Now it looks like the family are going to clean up too.
Ah Mr Nixon,what a meal ticket,(for his enemies).
Maybe Mr Nixon wasn’t as paranoid as we thought.No Meds, thanks. Or rather no, meds thanks.
Well, look, I agree with most attacks on Nixon from the right, and I’m not defending (or at least I don’t mean to defend) Nixon’s dishonesty, but my reflexive disgust for squealers is hard to overcome. Furthermore, the damage done to the presidency and the republic far outweighed the benefits of holding Nixon to account.
Also, as far as I know, his only crime re. Watergate was complicity in the cover-up. There was no evidence that he had advance notice of the break-in itself.
Either way, I blame Nixon in part for not burning the tapes and standing up for executive privacy. But Mark, I think calling this slithering snitch Felt an “American hero,” is, any way you slice it, a major exaggeration.
DrZin, maybe I did overstate things…but I do think the principle was important, that no President is above the law. There’s a lot of ground between ‘slithering snitch’ and ‘American hero’...probably, is with most things, the truth is in the middle somewhere.
Posted by Mark Coffey on 2005 06 01 at 12:36 AM • permalinkI wondered when someone would bring up Ellsberg…and (I’m asking, I don’t remember) didn’t Nixon know about that break-in beforehand?...
Posted by Mark Coffey on 2005 06 01 at 12:46 AM • permalinkCertainly some middle ground here. All things being equal, I believe Presidents should be as close to morally perfect as a mortal can be. If the Democrats played honestly (testing the limits of the hypothetical), I’d be as much an anti-G.O.P. adversary as John McCain. But all things are not equal.
Because the Democrats are historically enormously corrupt and howlingly dishonest and are always given a pass by their elite media allies, Republican presidents start with the deck stacked against them. I’m DEFINITELY prepared to forgive minor lapses of honesty (O.K., lies) on the part of my party members (or ideological allies, more specifically) because we suffer giant penalties to which the Democrats are immune.
Furthermore, those lapses are seldom of national consequence (When it comes to questions of real national import, American conservatives don’t have to lie; Democrats do).
Which was worse? Nixon lying about the cover-up or Clinton trading advanced military technology and half of the port of San Diego to the Chinese Communists in exchange for campaign cash?
Conservatives start off with a huge media image deficit, so the idea that “whistle-blowers” like Felt somehow “keep politics honest” is baloney; he simply won a giant victory for the duplicitous Democrats.
If the situation were that it was somehow the business of this guy Felt to uncover and root out corruption in the Nixon White House, and he did his job without compromise, in a public manner, his value as a historic figure would be much higher in my eyes.
Clearly Nixon engaged in the cover-up (but if the punishment should fit the crime, Nixon’s sentence was excessive). Felt’s daughter is quoted urging dad to reveal himself ‘for the family’ so they can pay some tuition bills. Woodstein have made ridden the Watergate story for thirty years. It’s hard to find a truly admirable character in this.
Felt and I seem to agree on one thing:
“Felt suggested in many interviews, and in his own memoir in 1979, that anyone who would reveal the kind of information “Deep Throat” did would be a traitor. . . I think one reason that all of [the so-called Watergate experts], and I myself, were wrong is because Felt made so many remarks about being a traitor; if that won’t throw you off, I don’t know what will.”
-Adrian Havill, author of Deep Truth
“When I spoke to Felt a few years ago, he said in no uncertain terms that for an FBI employee to leak details of a criminal investigation to a newspaper would be a terrible betrayal.”-Tim Noah of Slate magazine
Because the Democrats are historically enormously corrupt…
Oh, God, I wish some reporter with balls would make his name exposing the nature, degree, and depth of that corruption. Unions, the mob, fixing elections, foreign agents…
Odd how the blindness seems to strike when Democrats get involved in crimes. The near universal practice of leaving out the party affiliations of Democrats arrested and convicted, for example.
Posted by Rob Crawford on 2005 06 01 at 09:43 AM • permalinkQuestion
How did Felt know about the missing 18 minutes on the Nixon’s Tape ?
Possible Answer
Hoover had the White House bugged. Felt was Hoovers number 2 . Who would be trusted with such an operation.
At a least Felt might a have a tape that might fill in the gap of those minutes. at worst Felt had his mole ( bugs need to be replace ever so often or move for better coveage) in WH erase the tape.
Isn’t it convenent that the brake in ( bug in DNC stop working, wink ,wink, Nudge, nudge) occur three days after the outsider was appointed. Discover by a security guard of the complex ( which Creep broke into with ease before) because he found a piece of tape on a Door. Not once but TWICE. Why would guys inside the building replace the tape ? I could just hear Mark just cussing about the slow witted security guard. Then having to go and hold Woodward and Bernstein hands on where to go. After all this planing he manages to bring down the new boss, but is foiled by another new boss.
Mark Felt = American Black Adder
Posted by Alien Grey on 2005 06 01 at 09:51 AM • permalinkPersonally, I believe Richard Nixon was well on his way to becoming a great President. He was closer to a moderate than a conservative and he worked hard to forge peaceful relations with the Soviet Union and China and to bring a close to the Vietnam War.
I believe every President has sins he tries to hide, whether his own or of his underlings. Certainly Bill Clinton did. What President Nixon did to cover up Watergate was not right by any stretch of the imagination. But probably common to other Presidents, including JFK and LBJ.
But the strident and vicious efforts directed towards him and the results, especially the establishment of a liberal mainstream media continously antagonistic towards the Republican Party, were far too harsh and disproportionate with relation to the sins committed. In my opinion. Which is the only one here that counts. I think.
Posted by wronwright on 2005 06 01 at 10:28 AM • permalinkWell, I’m clearly in the minority view here, but if Felt was a traitor, wasn’t Nixon even more so? Burglaries? Politically motivated audits? Obstruction of justice? I’m as conservative as they come, but this is a far bigger betrayal than anything Felt did…This aren’t minor indiscretions…they are felonies.
Posted by Mark Coffey on 2005 06 01 at 10:30 AM • permalinkMark Coffey… Yes, problem is, those all started under FDR…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 06 01 at 10:49 AM • permalinkIn my opinion. Which is the only one here that counts. I think.
In fact, maybe we should just let me comment and leave the rest of you out of it. None of you have anything worthwhile to say. And I’m so smart. Maybe Tim can make his posting and then at the end write “now, what does wronwright say about that?”. And then I’ll correct his spelling and stuff like that.
At some point, maybe Tim will just let me go right to my comment. You know, Tim says “George Galloway ...” and I come back with “is a complete and utter tosser”. Tim can say “Mecca ...” and I can comment “should be carpet bombed”. Much more efficient and it’s so much easier on all of you.
I’m trying to get the denizens of Tim Dunlop’s blog to go along with that too. So far it’s not working. But they’ll see that I’m right. On all things. In all ways. Especially the Mecca thing.
Posted by wronwright on 2005 06 01 at 10:51 AM • permalinkIf you haven’t read G. Gordon Liddy’s bio, “Will,” you don’t know the truth about Watergate. A postscript to the book, Liddy won his case against John Dean in court just a year or two ago.
From austinbay.net (sorry I still haven’t figured out how to link) this morning for some additional information about Felt. “His family members . . . persuaded him to talk about his role in the Watergate scandal, saying he deserves to receive accolades before his death. His daughter, Joan, argued that he could “make enough money to pay some bills, like the debt I’ve run up for the children’s education.”“But there is this richly ironic note, one worthy of a Greek tragedy: Felt was convicted in the 1970s for authorizing illegal break-ins at homes of people associated with the radical Weather Underground. He was pardoned by President Reagan in 1981.”
Why is coming out now? I think it’s to deflect attention away from the new book about the Clinton’s which must be pretty devastating. Funny thing about the MSM, they always have something about Nixon or McCarthy up their sleeves to spring on us when their darlings are going to be exposed again.
Not that it matters. Reagan might have the teflon president, but Clinton is the permanently white-washed one. Whatever dirt comes out is immediately washed away in a tsunami of media adoration.
DrZin: I’m DEFINITELY prepared to forgive minor lapses of honesty (O.K., lies) on the part of my party members (or ideological allies, more specifically) because we suffer giant penalties to which the Democrats are immune.
The last time I heard this argument, it was a Palestinian terrorist declaring cowardly attacks on civilians legitimate on the basis that Israel was ‘so much stronger.’ It held as much water then, which is to say about the same quantity as your average colander.
So Deep Throat came out of hiding. Big deal. What does he think he’s gonna get—a wad of cash for the movie rights? If so, he and his family had better talk to the porn industry. Maybe he can bargain for a sequel.
As for the MSM…..they’ve milked this one dry.
Less humorously…..sadly, Nixon broke laws in the course of the cover up. More accurately, he was caught breaking laws. I often wonder how many Presidents broke laws in the execution of their term. Not “if”, but “how many”. Anyone in the Oval Office has to walk a fine line between legal and not legal.
Do I think that rules are made to be broken? No. But any intelligent leader has to interpret standing laws and codes in terms of the current situation, and sometimes that leader goes from gray to dark in the process. Sometimes that act is deliberate. A true leader accepts the responsibility for his decision, up to and including punishment.
I don’t admire Nixon for what he did. The burglarly (if he was actually involved with that), and the subsequent cover up caused more harm than good, and was strictly political. He resigned only when presented with insurmountable odds, and possible impeachment.
But I don’t see that any leader of any nation can be all sweetness and light. There’s a dark side to the world that we live in, and one must get their hands dirty to clean the messes up. If you don’t believe that, look at Iraq.
There’s no black and white answer to this one, folks. Suffice it to say that Nixon broke the law, paid for it, and he is still in the history books as one of the better Presidents. ‘Tis a strange world that we live in.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2005 06 01 at 08:20 PM • permalinkThe last time I heard this argument, it was a Palestinian terrorist declaring cowardly attacks on civilians legitimate on the basis that Israel was ‘so much stronger.’ It held as much water then, which is to say about the same quantity as your average colander.
The absurd error in proportion aside, you’re analogy is backwards. Palestinian acts of terror are repeatedly justified and forgiven by the international media, the punditry, and academia. This issue much more closely resembles the shootout in which that little Palestinian boy was killed by a stray bullet, thought (perhaps dubiously) to have come from an IDF weapon.
The Palestinians got years of potent anti-Israeli propaganda from this event all out of proportion to the context of violent events in that theater (Palestinian savages calmly empty their SMG clips into the heads of toddlers and it doesn’t make a smudge in their media shine. If anything, it just shows how much the poor things suffer). Had Israel taken steps to cover up this unfortunate event, it would have been more than understandable.
I want my allies to be stand-up guys, but that doesn’t mean I think we should necessarily lynch our leader for not living up to a standard that the other side couldn’t even dream of meeting.
DrZin: The absurd error in proportion aside, you’re analogy is backwards.
It’s hard to ‘out-proportion’ the significance of bringing down the leader of the free world, but whichever you take to be worse, that’s reflection of your position.
As to the rest, no, the analogy is dead-on, much as you might wish it otherwise. The media is the surface, not the substance. You advocated a stance of schoolyard sophistry “It’s okay for us to cheat because they cheat more.” No, it’s not. It’s wrong morally, it’s wrong ethically, and it’s not even practical—a fact which has cost dwellers in glass domiciles a pretty proverbial penny from time immemorial. We are, frankly, better than that and better than them. You may be willing to indulge dishonesty and hypocrisy from our side. I am not.
“It’s okay for us to cheat because they cheat more.” No, it’s not. It’s wrong morally, it’s wrong ethically, and it’s not even practical . . .
I’m not defending dishonesty as a political strategy; I’m saying that I think it’s wrong that we consider it our noble duty to up and throw our imperfect leaders to the dogs for relatively inconsequential lapses in moral judgement. Particularly when those dogs don’t eat Democrats.
I should have been more clear, though. I didn’t mean to imply that it’s perfectly O.K. for someone on our side to break the law. I’m not arguing for impunity either.
But there’s a better way to go about demanding moral uprightness from our colleagues than the public betrayal and the grandiose, masochistic mea culpa that was Watergate.
I didn’t say that I hated Woodward and Bernstein, did I? Don’t like them too much, but they were doing their jobs. It’s everyone’s responsibility to do their job and it’s not our job to demand that our own people are prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
What got me started was the idea that Felt’s bringing Nixon down was some noble quest on his part. That the betrayal and destruction of a Republican presidency for improprieties of which every 20th century Democratic president is guilty makes our political system better. Look how much damage was done by 4 years of that rat, Carter! We’re still paying for that one! BIG! I don’t think a President Ford would have sold out the Shah.
Thanks for that, too, Mark Felt! Ptui!
We are, frankly, better than that and better than them. You may be willing to indulge dishonesty and hypocrisy from our side. I am not.
We are better, and I don’t believe in indulgence. But nor do I believe in political suicide or regicide. Particularly when the entire Free World suffers the blowback.
The true tragedy of Watergate was that it directly lead to the betrayal of South Vietnam by the US congress. If Nixon, who, lets face facts, was a complete son of a bitch, had still been President the financial aid and military supplies could have been enough to prevent the invasion by North Vietnam.
Posted by Just Another Bloody Lawyer on 2005 06 04 at 04:11 AM • permalink
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Here I thought Deep Throat is what spawned all the pornos, when it was really vice versa. God bless America.
Still, it’s kinda weird to actually know, Deep Throat was always ultimate in secret sources.