QUOTE (kyle @ Jun 2 2005, 08:53 PM) | http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8064563/
Many of you, like myself, are old enough to vividly remember Watergate. The revelation of the past couple of days has been nothing short of fascinating.
After joining the board and having the priviledge to interact with PhilOhio, I had developed a secret fantasy that he was "Deep Throat".
In all seriousness, as I read via Woodward of Felt's frustrations/motivations, I can't help but sense a resonance with many of the things Phil has voiced here on the board. Do yall agree? |
Kyle,
I am happy as a clam this week.
Very perceptive. Nope, it wasn't me, but I would have done it in a second. Sorry I couldn't. And I voted for Nixon. I was overseas, witnessing other counterproductive things "your" government was doing, and lying about at that time. And I later did what I could, in a very restrained way, to fix it. I don't consider any of that a closed book just yet. Several of yesteryear's big names still need a bit more public recognition for some of their yet unrecognized accomplishments. Timing is everything.
Today I read Bob Woodward's account of Mark Felt's technical management of their contacts. If you want to understand what I did for a living, just read it. Felt conducted himself in a totally professional, responsible manner. I can see he had good training and deserved to be at the top in the FBI. I would like to shake his hand. This is what character and integrity is all about. I also understand why he chose to remain silent all these years, and why he finally decided (after his daughter urged him) to go public before passing on.
None of this is to suggest that I shared Felt's strong support of J. Edgar Hoover, who was neither all good nor all bad. He was a slippery politician, and not above abusing his office and doing bad things to good people. But Hoover did promote and surround himself with some very competent people of greater personal interity.
Woodward's also a good guy. Read all that he has written over the years. Unlike most at the Post, he is actually a fair and objective journalist, nothing like his former leftist sleazoid boss Ben Bradlee, whose business was simply propaganda, to make Katie Graham happy (may she simmer on medium broil for 10,000,000 years).
I might seem like a guy full of contradictions. Years ago, one evening I had 5 - 6 hours to privately discuss all sorts of past events and personal philosophies with G. Gordon Liddy. Here's another man of great professionalism, competence, good judgment, and personal integrity...and with an FBI background, like Felt. Yes, I know what you are saying about that last one. But under circumstances of that era, he did the what the courts thought was the wrong thing for what I think were the right reasons. He was working against some very bad far leftists in the Democratic Party, and he broke some laws in a way which may have seemed to him to be justifiable. I came within a hair's breadth of being in a similar situation, under orders, during COINTELPRO days, but the program folded before the assignment was finalized. So I have a lot of empathy. The Felt/Liddy parallels are many. I've never met Felt.
Don't ever accept some popular image of either good guys or bad guys. Seeing how and why those images are created, we should instinctively know this by now.
Bug,
I regret to say that your point of view is 200% dead wrong. Yet it is probably shared by a majority of Americans, who have some strange notion that it is just plain wrong to drop the dime on bad guys who do bad things to everybody. I've never figured out the twisted logic here. It's like saying it is not honorable to turn in the heroin dealer who hangs out at the elementary school playground, but masked DEA strike team members who roll him up are heroes.
Precisely why do you believe that a whistle blower is, by definition, regardless of the circumstances, a "POS", as you put it? Have you ever been personally confronted by a situation where you have secret knowledge of very bad things going on, have the ability to do something to stop it, and must make a hard decision on taking personal risks to intervene, or being a coward who does nothing...in keeping with your idea of the guy who does the right thing? Explain to me just how this works.
I laugh my ejection port off whenever I hear inexperienced, unsophisticated people then launch into the standard parroted line about how one must do everything through established channels, the courts, ad nauseum. Doesn't work. Can't. Many choke points are set up within those systems to short stop political problems before they spin out of control. Mark Felt understood this, being on the inside. He knew that the only way Watergate was going to be properly dealt with was to dump the whole thing out in the open, by guiding the investigation of young Woodward, who he knew was a straight arrow who would pursue it to the bitter end. Public knowledge is the court of last resort.
Wherever did we get this looney idea that it is wrong to turn in a scum bag, but F.D. Roosevelt was being a national hero when he shipped thousands of loyal Japanese Americans to desert internment camps during WW-II in his 1940s version of the Patriot Act? Is our national brain made of corn meal mush, or what?
If the world agrees with your point of view, Bug, plan on everything getting steadily worse, and only bad guys running everything in the end. Your point of view does not allow for anybody drawing an ethical line in the sand and saying, "Beyond this point they are not gong to go, I am the guy who says so, and you can be 100% sure that I will do whatever I can to make that stick." Whiny weenies improve nothing.
And do I or Mark Felt have the moral or legal right and responsibility to do what he did? You can bet Bill Clinton's sticky cigar we do. There is no honor in failing to flush an over-filled toilet.
Bug, when you are faced with the hard choices, do the right thing. There is such a thing. Forget some whacked out, immature popular conception. It isn't necessarily what the smelly armpit TV football watcher crowd says it is...you know, the guys with IQs the size of their hat bands and an Amalgamated Steam Fitters Union bumper sticker on their rusty pickup.
(Oops! I almost threw in something about Kahr Thompsons, new "L" drums, and Wolf ammo. The Devil was tugging at my sleeve again. Sorry guys.) |