Deep Throat Felt
Many are commenting on the announcement and Washington Post confirmation today that Mark Felt, 2nd in command at the FBI at the time, was Deep Throat.
What I find interesting are the threads of thought regarding the legality of Felt's actions (Rush was discussing this morning) -- and then I stumble across this in National Review Online's The Corner:
CAN THIS BE RIGHT? [Mark R. Levin] W. Mark Felt and Edward Miller President Reagan, 1981; granted clemency for authorizing FBI agents to break into Vietnam protestors' offices without warrants.Did Reagan pardon W. Mark Felt? For more: La Shawn Barber has some excellent historical references. Ed Morrissey keeps his finger in the Legacy Media dike exploding superlatives for Felt:
Like the scandal he helped expose, Felt and his role were much more complicated than a simple hero-or-traitor binary choice allows.Scott Johnson at PowerLine also takes us back in time to "the July 1974 issue of Commentary magazine, before Richard Nixon resigned from office, [when] Edward Jay Epstein asked in a memorable essay: "Did the press uncover Watergate?"" Real-time American history in the making (and spinning). UPDATE: Kevin Aylward has the Vanity Fair article link. Ann Althouse asks if anyone else is thinking what she is thinking:
The hidden identity was fascinating, the actual identity quite boring.Patterico sees a Hollywood plot. Timothy Noah crows "Told you so," and sums up my thoughts:
His unmasking makes everybody look a little less noble.UPDATE II: Stephen Bainbridge asks:
And the crickets chirped. . . .Supreme Court Justice Lous Brandeis once said:
I've heard investigative reporters invoke that quote to justify their jobs. So I have a question: Why doesn't that apply to journalistic sources? Why should we trust stories based on unnamed sources, when there have been so many prominent cases lately of journalists just making stuff up? Why shouldn't journalists have to name their sources?Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.