Aside from the initial disclosure of his true identity, I’ve paid little attention to this week’s public conversation about Deep Throat, so I was taken aback this morning when I tuned into the talking-head shows and learned that former Nixonians are trying to smear Mark Felt as some kind of bum for blowing the whistle on their wrongdoing. This flabbergasts me for a half-dozen different reasons, not least of which is the incredible notion that TV commentators are still (or once again) arguing about a political battle that was won and lost (depending on your perspective) thirty years ago. I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me, given the lingering bitterness over the Clintons, Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and even, in some quarters, the Civil War. People have long memories and grudges do endure. But I guess I keep hoping there’ll be an outbreak of common sense any day now, and this eternal optimism causes me to be caught consistently off-guard when it doesn’t happen.
I’m reluctant to get into this because I really don’t want to pick a political fight here on Simple Tricks after the pleasant silence of these past couple of months. But when I hear that people like G. Gordon Liddy — one of those who did prison time for the Watergate break-in, just in case you don’t know — are calling Mark Felt a disgrace and a traitor because he went to the press with what he knew, well, that’s so ridiculous as to beg some kind of comment.
