"He put America first"

How refreshing. After watching the parade of convicted felons question Mark Felt's "honor," followed quickly on their shit-stained heels by the parade of wingnuts accusing him of personally installing Pol Pot, it is refreshing to listen to reasonable men forget partisanship and be reasonable.

Duberstein said that, in reading all the media reports of the last few days, he put himself back in his shoes as White House chief of staff. He thought, with the information Felt had in front of him, "What options did he have?" "He couldn't go to the White House Chief of Staff (Haldeman or Ehrlichman); he couldn't go to the Justice Department (John Mitchell); he couldn't go to the White House Counsel (John Dean). He did something responsible. The congressional committees hadn't been formed yet. What do you do? Felt put America first."

Duberstein's words are unintentionally ironic, given that "America first" is the slogan and philosophical principle that governs Nixon partisan Patrick Buchanan's contemporary political outlook. Buchanan, departing from the neoconservative view of foreign policy, says that America should act in its own clearly defined national interests rather than pursuing what he would see as Wilsonian adventures. Buchanan considers Felt's behavior "treacherous."

What Watergate should still tell us -- but Stein, Noonan and Buchanan appear to willfully ignore -- is that a corrupt administration is dangerous. Men in the Nixon administration went to jail, not just for "dirty tricks," but for multiple break-ins (which, it is true, Felt also did in the FBI's pursuit of violent radical groups), misusing the CIA for political ends, payoffs, cover-ups, etc. These actions, committed domestically, had reverberations around the globe.

The aforementioned Duberstein was Ken Duberstein, Ronald Reagan's chief of staff. And the writer of this piece, extolling Felt and putting those other idiots in their place? Robert George, a member of the New York Post editorial staff and a former staffer of Newt Gingrich. Hat's off to both of them.

It's hard for people to remember, following the partisan crusade to run Bill Clinton out of office, the effect the growing realization of the extent of criminality being run out of the White House had on even Republicans back in 1974.

In fact, I have found one of the more curious things about the wall to wall coverage this has received in the past few days to be that I haven't seen one comment from perhaps the last steadfast Republican supporter of Nixon that summer: the head of the Republican National Committee at the time, George H.W. Bush. We know his son doesn't know what to think about all of this, specifically Felt's "relationship with the media" (an odd way to look at it, from a story with one of the strangest headlines in a newspaper this year), but what of Poppy?