Good morning, Mr. Felt. Your mission, Mark, should you choose to accept it is to bring down a president and elevate the Fourth Estate, permanently substituting self promotion and cynicism for integrity and idealism. As always, should you be exposed or subpoenaed, the editors will disavow all knowledge of your actions. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck Mark.
And all this time I was betting on a dark horse -- G. Gordon Liddy. Not.
Actually, what amazes me is that there hasn't quite been the nostalgic love fest for all the editor's men that so many were no doubt expecting when Deep Throat's identity was finally, ahem, coughed up. Is this because of a new introspection on the part of Biig Media that questions the pedastal these men have been put upon? Or have the alternate voices now heard in the blogosphere made it impossible to achieve a harmonious single party, uh, I mean, story line? Or does it merely constitute "proof" in the eyes of those who, like Eric Alterman, believe that conservatives really have taken over Big Media? Nah. It now appears that, In the immortal words of, well, Deep Throat, that all we should do is, "follow the money."
There is no way to definitively ascertain this now, but I would like to know if Mr. Felt every actually told Mr. Woodward or Mr. Bernstein that their lives were in danger, or if this was, shall we say, a little journalistic license taken by an overactive imagination to make our intrepid self-professed protectors of freedom look a little more noble, if not more manly. At the very least, perhaps all mentions of Deep Throat, dark secrets, trenchcoats, and anonymous meetings in dimly lit parking garages at 2 AM can be dispensed with in polite company for a while.