Curmudgeonly & Skeptical

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Sunday, June 12, 2005

"Rich ... party of one. Your table is ready."

Frank Rich who, as much as anyone is emblematic of the walled up brain liberales turn to for sagacity, is the focus (for whatever reason) of one of those Matt Drudge "Developing" teasers from yesterday -- [FRANK RICH: The great Watergate cover up of 2005... .. Developing]. It's developed, and what a bunch of crap. Of course, it's widely thought that anything Frank Rich says is crap, but this at least serves a purpose. On Wednesday Ann Coulter's column was also devoted to Deep Throat, only her column actually contained something factual. Let's compare:

Coulter [Woodward does Washington]	Rich [Don't Follow the Money]
Ironically, only because of Watergate — which Felt helped instigate — could a nitwit like Jimmy Carter ever become president — a perch from which Carter pardoned draft dodgers and prosecuted Mark Felt. No wonder Felt kept denying he was "Deep Throat."	Was Mr. Felt a hero or a villain? Should he "follow the money" into a book deal, and if so, how would a 91-year-old showing signs of dementia either write a book or schmooze about it with Larry King? How did Vanity Fair scoop The Post? How does Robert Redford feel about it all? Such were the questions that killed time for a nation awaiting the much-heralded feature mediathon, the Michael Jackson verdict.
Of course, in Felt's defense, he wasn't Deep Throat. There was no Deep Throat. Now we know.	Three years ago, on Watergate's 30th anniversary, an ABC News poll found that two-thirds of Americans couldn't explain what the scandal was, and no one was racing to enlighten them this time around. Vanity Fair may have taken the trouble to remind us that Watergate was a web of crime yielding the convictions and guilty pleas of more than 30 White House and Nixon campaign officials, but few others did. Watergate has gone back to being the "third-rate burglary" of Nixon administration spin. It is once again being covered up.
Now that Woodward and Felt are both claiming Felt was Deep Throat, the jig is up. The fictional Deep Throat knew things Felt could not possibly have known, such as the 18 1/2-minute gap on one of the White House tapes. Only six people knew about the gap when Woodward reported it. All of them worked at the White House. Felt not only didn't work at the White House, but when the story broke, he also didn't even work at the FBI anymore. Deep Throat was a smoker and heavy drinker, neither of which describes Mark Felt. Woodward claimed he signaled Deep Throat by moving a red flag in a flowerpot to the back of his balcony and that Deep Throat signaled him by drawing the hands of a clock in Woodward's New York Times. <>But in his 1993 book, "Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein," Adrian Havill did something it had occurred to no one else to do: He looked at Woodward's old apartment! ... Even from the back of the apartment complex, the balcony was too high for any flowerpot to be seen. In addition, newspapers were not delivered door-to-door in Woodward's apartment building but were left in a stack in the lobby. Deep Throat could not have known which newspaper Woodward would pick up.	Had the scandal been vividly resuscitated as the long national nightmare it actually was, it would dampen all the Felt fun by casting harsh light on our own present nightmare. "The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before" was how the former Nixon speech writer William Safire put it on this page almost nine months ago. The current administration, a second-term imperial presidency that outstrips Nixon's in hubris by the day, leads the attack, trying to intimidate and snuff out any Woodwards or Bernsteins that might challenge it,
We might have known all this before 1993 if America's ever-vigilant watchdog media had been, say, half as skeptical of Bob Woodward's claims as they were of Juanita Broaddrick's.	The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of failing to puncture the administration's prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated.
Synopsis: I learned stuff I didn't know. So did you.	Synopsis: Frank Rich is still living in 1973, and is not taking his Lithium.

| E-MAIL Real King of France at 6/12/2005 12:31:00 PM PERMLINK (0) |

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"I did not vote for Obama but he is remarkable. In less than three weeks in office he has collected more than $150,000 in back taxes."
Gayle Miller