DEEP THROAT

I've always loved the pseudonym Deep Throat. It fits so perfectly the situation in Washington at the time. Remember the plumbers were trying to discover and plug all leaks. The money wrench (or pipe wrench), a tool commonly used in this work, is a wrench with the capacity for grasping big items. The part that does the gripping is called the throat. For gripping large objects, the wrench needs to have a deep throat. In the case of Watergate, the large objects to be gripped were highups in the Nixon administration, and eventually even Nixon himself.

There have been some who relate the term Deep Throat to a pornographic movie at the time with that title. Never having seen the movie, I don't know if the association is appropriate or not. I like my associations with a monkey or pipe wrench much better. More poetic (sic).

What about Felt's disclosures? Were they ethical and beneficial? I think so. Not only did Felt swear loyalty to the United States, but so did Nixon and all his minons involved in the nefarious activities of that period. Clearly, the Nixon administration was trying to take over the country and destroy it. Nixon placed his minons in most, of not all, government agencies to keep watch and at least try to control what each agency did. At the time of Watergate I worked for the Census Bureau and we even had one of his political hacks stationed in the Population Divison reading every statistical report that we prepared and sticking his nasty little nose into everything going on. Fortunately, there was a lot of foot-dragging all across the federal bureaucracy that contributed to Nixon's failure to utterly destroy the government.

Sadly, we're seeing much the same thing happening again. Oh, the methods may not be exactly the same, but the purpose clearly is to take over the government and run the nation as a fascist totalitarian state. We managed, through the wisdom and good actions of good people, to put an end to Nixon's attempted coup. I hope we can do the same with the Bush crowd. Recent senate action in thwarting the right wing effort to destroy a bulwark of the checks and balances that make our government work is a positive sign. The emergence of honest and democratic minded governmental and political leaders in that era should give pause to current Bush administrations efforts at destroying our nation. We stopped the takeover once, we can do it again.