Deep Throat Analysis By Way Of Talk Radio.

A lot of people are weighing in with opinions in all the furor over the revelation that Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt, the FBI's Number Two man during the Watergate scandal. I heard an interesting conversation on National Public Radio this afternoon on my way home from my wage slavery containment facility. The participants were men who were on the scene during the height of the scandal. William Doyle Ruckelshaus, Jeb Stuart Magruder and Charles Wendell "Chuck" Colson were on hand for the listening audience. Before my humble analysis of their respective efforts to state their cases, I did the following research into their backgrounds. Research courtesy of Wikipedia.

William Doyle Ruckelshaus: Ruckelshaus served as the first head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970, was subsequently acting director of the FBI, and then Deputy Attorney General of the United States.

In a 1973 event known as the "Saturday Night Massacre", Ruckelshaus and his boss, Elliot Richardson, famously resigned their positions within the Justice Department rather than obey an order from President Richard Nixon to fire the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, who was investigating official misconduct on the part of the president and his aides.

Full story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ruckelshaus

Jeb Stuart Magruder: Magruder's first major political job was managing the successful run of Donald Rumsfeld for the House of Representatives from Illinois in 1962. Magruder was appointed to the White House staff in 1969 as Special Assistant to the President. He worked for H.R. Haldeman and Herbert Klein, Nixon's Communications Director for the Executive Branch. Magruder served in the White House until 1971, when he left to manage the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP) as Deputy Director, and assistant to CRP Director and former Attorney General John N. Mitchell. The campaign to re-elect the President was extraordinarily successful, winning 49 of 50 states and the District of Columbia, and Magruder went on to manage Nixon's inauguration in January 1973 as Inaugural Director.

In April 1973, Magruder began cooperating with federal prosecutors. In exchange, Magruder was allowed to plead guilty in August 1973 to a one-count indictment of conspiracy to obstruct justice, defraud the United States, and eavesdrop on the Democratic Party's national headquarters. On May 21, 1974, Magruder was sentenced by Judge John Sirica to 4 months to 10 years for his role in the failed Watergate burglary and subsequent coverup; he served seven months of the sentence in a prison near Allenwood, Pennsylvania. After his sentencing, Magruder said, "I am confident that this country will survive its Watergates and its Jeb Magruders."

Full story: http://www.answers.com/topic/jeb-stuart-magruder

Charles Wendell "Chuck" Colson was the chief counsel for President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1973. His later life has been spent working with his nonprofit organization devoted to prison ministry called Prison Fellowship. Colson is also a noted speaker and author expressing his own personal faith.

As an atheistic intellectual and former U.S. Marine, Chuck Colson was a "tough guy" White House insider during the Nixon administration. Known as President Nixon's hatchet man, Colson could be counted on to break the china - do whatever was necessary - to achieve the desired political ends of his boss. Colson was very loyal to President Nixon. He bragged, "I’d walk over my own grandmother to re-elect Richard Nixon." The phrase that joined the American lexicon was the rather more entertaining " ... run over his own grandmother ... " as if with an automobile. Currently, a variety of other verbs and prepositions are sometimes used, but the sense is preserved: ruthlessness.

Colson was involved in the Watergate Scandal, and in 1974 voluntarily agreed to a plea of nolo contendere (no contest) to obstruction of justice in the Watergate affair. Some months before this plea, Colson became an evangelical Christian. Editorial comics in several U. S. newspapers, as well as magazines such as Newsweek and Time, ridiculed the decision, claiming that it was cynical. He spent much of his prison sentence at Maxwell Correctional Facility in Alabama. He was released in 1976.

In October 2002, Colson, along with several other prominent American evangelical leaders, was a co-signer of the Land letter to President Bush which outlined a "just war" endorsement of the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq.

Full story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Colson

Okay, here we go: The discussion centered around Mr. Felt's motives. Ruckelshaus seemed to indicate that Felt must have thought he had no choice in exposing the Nixon camp's activities the way he did because he (Ruckelshaus) and his boss, Attorney General Elliot Richardson resigned rather than follow the Presdient's orders to fire lead prosecutor Archibald Cox. Ruckelshaus also dismissed the idea that Felt's actions were triggered by his having been bypassed to head the FBI.

Magruder acted as if the whole ugly chapter in our political history was a mere inconvenience, and expressed the view that Felt was a simply a malcontent who betrayed his president. No surprise here, after all Magruder was the head of the committee to re-elect Nixon. Note also Magruder's ties to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Colson was a bit more shrill in his criticism of Felt. He claimed that Felt passed up a chance to be remembered as a great policy man for a cheap footnote in history as the man who brought down a president by betraying his oath of office. Colson, as you can plainly see from the Wikipedia bio, is nuttier than an Almond Joy bar. Perhaps the only person in Nixon's crew that was nuttier was G.Gordon Liddy.

Let's look at Colson's analysis. How many of you can name the current number two man in the FBI? Uh-huh. I thought so. That argument makes no sense at all. As for the idea that Felt betrayed his oath of office, well, did it occur to Colson that the very president for whom he committed his crimes was just as guilty of that same offense?

At least Magruder's view, as unlikely as it seems to me, has some rational plausibility. Colson's does not, unless you happen to believe that extreme loyalty to a man who showed his complete and utter contempt for the American people is an honorable thing. That's why I included the piece about Colson's jumping on the Iraq War bandwagon in my excerpt. Colson would be an ideal fit in the current administration. Come to think of it, so would Magruder...

After the three men were finished, I switched to the local knuckledrag radio station to hear the paranoid tones of Mr. Jay Severin. Yesterday Jay was on the fence as to whether Felt was a hero or a rat. He implied that Felt had misused his position, and had likely committed serious crimes in exposing Nixon as a criminal. Today he seemed to relax that position somewhat when a caller gave him the Goodfellas ruling: "Henry Hill was a rat. Mark Felt might not be a hero, but he ain't no rat." The implication that Hill, by having been a career gangster who turned on his people, was the real definition of a rat. Felt, by comparison, was not directly involved with Nixon's crimes and therefore is not a rat.

Jay then surprised me by implying that there are times when one must break the law in order to bring to light a more malignant crime. He cited several instances of civil disobedience that fit the definition of criminal acts, but that eventually exposed the supporting laws as unjust. I don't think I completely agree with Severin's comparison as it relates to the Felt case, but it was encouraging to see Jay straighten his posture a little bit.

In the end we have a case of a man who blew the whistle on one of the most controversial presidents in our history. Nixon did do some good things. He appointed the first head of the EPA. He re-opened channels of communication with China. However, he extended the Vietnam War and murdered millions of South-East Asians who had no part in the conflict. He then subverted the law to apparently try to place himself in a position not unlike that in which we see President Bush today.

Richard Nixon deserves to be remembered with scorn and disgust. Unfortunately, the men in his party who came after him used his Watergate model to bring us to a place that I think Nixon would look at with a deep sense of pride. Just as unfortunately, the so-called "liberal media" has relinquished its responsibilities to report what is happening, not what the administration tells us is happening.

I'll end this piece with two questions: Where and who are the next Woodward and Bernstein? Even more intriguing, who will be the next Deep Throat?

Special thanks to Ken Kanniff, Connecticut's Most Wanted Gangsta for giving me a good kick up the backside for the laziness exhibited in what passes for my last two posts.