"Deep Throat" Revealed!

(Image courtesy of the Slush Factory)

Following up on Steve-O's jump onto the Everybody's Doing It Speculation Bandwagon, I thought I ought to just finish this thing off once and for all.

C'mon, it makes sense, doesn't it? And after Sunday night's post-Super Bowl episode, I'd say not only Grandpa, but the entire cast are going Code Blue.....

YIPS from Steve: At long last, we'll beat Woodstein to the punch and print a picture of who "Deep Throat" is.....

The one and only Linda Lovelace

Here's my problem with the whole thing: I have lost confidence not just in the professional ethics of journalism today, I've lost confidence in the journalistic profession totally. There is absolutely no check on their power other than their willingness to police themselves, and the market consquences to their organ if impropriety is revealed.

If it is revealed.

Think about it for a second, if you were the Nixon administration lawyer who was the source to Bob Woodward: you are in your early seventies now, at your youngest. Whatever the partisan intensities of the time were have cooled. Nobody's going to issue a fatwa calling for your head if your identity is revealed. Nobody's going to kick you or your kids (or your grandkids) out of any clubs. It's not that nobody is going to care: everyone is going to care, but in a way that is in effect complimentary. Nobody defends Nixon anymore--there aren't any Nixon loyalists out there to speak of. (I mean, other than Son of Nixon of course!)

Think of the amount of money you could get selling your story, writing the book--think of what that type of dough could do for your family, what type of legacy that would leave for the grandkids, think of the automatic "senior-stateman" status that would confer, think of the live CNN coverage of your funeral.....

You get my drift.

So why hasn't Deep Throat come forward?

There are two answers:

One is that it would be deeply embarrassing to that person: say for example Pat Buchanan.

But to me what is becoming the more increasingly likely answer, given what we now know about the behavior of the "professional" media in pursuit of a story against a Republican president is that "Deep Throat" never existed as a single person.

The identity of Deep Throat hasn't been revealed because he never existed: it's not that the stories based on this "source" weren't true, it's just that there was never a single source. The promotion of the idea that there was a single source was a brilliantly simple means of advancing the story.

But the whole "we'll reveal after he's dead" idea is just becoming too suspicious for me as a means to hang it in whole on someone who was either partially or not at all involved.

I'd like to be proven wrong here, and I'm not making an accusation but rather floating an alternative theory.

Prove us wrong by revealing who Deep Throat is when they can dispute it if necessary.