In this episode, “NewsBusted” covers: State of the Union Address, President Obama, President Bush, Paul Krugman, United Nations, Himalayan Glaciers, Bob Woodward, New York Times, Roman Polanski, Childhood Obesity, and Coachella Music Festival.

For one thing, liberals are hypocritical. They have agendas when they’d be better off having principles. They praise whistle-blowers and investigative reporters, but only when Republicans, conservatives and/or the U.S. military suffer the consequences. So it was that they lionized Daniel Ellsberg for turning the Pentagon Papers over to the NY Times and heralded Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward for their Watergate expose, but demanded that James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles be prosecuted for their ACORN videos and wanted the computer hackers who uncovered the East Anglia emails, the ones proving global warming to be a major hoax, to be tarred and feathered.

I even remember when Time magazine put a group of highly publicized corporate whistle-blowers on their cover, hailing their courage and patriotism. Long before Time Magazine decided its cover boy would be Ben Bernanke, I was willing to wager that O’Keefe and Giles wouldn’t be Time’s 2009’s People of the Year.

When George W. Bush convinced a mere 42 countries to join us in the invasion of Iraq, liberals insisted he had gone off half-cocked. However, when Obama couldn’t convince any country to take the Guantanamo prisoners off our hands and could only get 40 nations to commit to joining us in Afghanistan, those on the left insisted he was a master of diplomacy.

The liberals keep telling us that, thanks to Obama’s policy of speaking endlessly and carrying a very small stick, America has gained renewed respect around the world. But, as usual, they don’t specify which countries respect us more these days now that they have good reason to fear us less. We know pretty darn well they’re not referring to Russia, Iran, Somalia, North Korea, Syria or China. They’re not even able to point to such erstwhile allies as Poland, Israel and the Czech Republic, all of whom are staggering around these days with American-made switchblades in their back.

Liberals, as well as a great many conservatives, were upset with George W. Bush for his massive spending. But these days, when Obama is quadrupling the deficit, the Left is cheering him on. Can you imagine what liberals would be saying if a Republican president announced something as nutty as Obama’s promise to spend his way to solvency?

For that matter, what would a typical liberal say if, after he broke the news that they were on the brink of bankruptcy, his wife’s response was to head out the front door, and when he asked her where she was going, she replied, “I’ll be back in a minute, honey, I’m just running out to pick up a few things at Tiffany’s”? Is there a jury in America that would find him guilty if he busted a chair over her head? But when it’s Obama going out the door to drop a few trillion on cap and trade and ObamaCare, the liberals just shake their heads like besotted newlyweds and say, “Isn’t he just cute as a button?”

The worst thing about liberalism isn’t even the lying and the double standards, but the fact that it’s contagious. For example, not too long ago, I heard Bill O’Reilly state that it was good for America that Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize. He said with a reasonably straight face that he liked the fact that the world saw us as a peaceful nation. I thought I could avoid such things by avoiding MSNBC. I was wrong. Instead, I thought my head would explode.

Barack Obama got the Prize for the very same reason that Jimmy Carter got it. They got it because they weren’t George W. Bush. The wooly-headed leftists in Norway keep making stupid decisions, handing out these medallions to the likes of Le Duc Tho, Kofi Anan, Desmond Tutu and Yasser Arafat, and clucks like Carter and Obama keep jetting over to Oslo to be clucked over.

If I were President Prelutsky and they tried to demean my reputation that way, I would not only reject the award, I would point out that the U.S. military has done more for the cause of world peace than all the diplomats and pacifists put together. Then I’d have someone teach me a little Norwegian so that I could tell them in their own language where they could put their damn Peace Prize.

Perhaps the best example of this comes from the 1976 movie, “All the President’s Men,” produced by Robert Redford and starring Redford and Dustin Hoffman as cub Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.  

The movie was a dramatization of Woodward and Bernstein’s 1974 book by the same name that chronicled the investigative reporting that led to the resignations of Bob Haldeman and John Erhlichman.  The book was a best-seller in its own right-especially after their editor suggested the early drafts needed something more catchy and they hit upon the idea of naming Woodward’s secret source of government information after the recent pornographic movie, “Deep Throat.”  

There was, however, one very substantive difference between the book and the movie-that has been lost on almost everyone:  While their book scrupulously avoided giving any hint of Deep Throat’s specific government employer, the movie version made it all too clear that Deep Throat was a member of Nixon’s White House staff-a whistle blower, if you will, so disgusted with the wrongdoing going on within the Nixon White House that he risked everything to pass along damaging information in the hopes that its publication would lead to the criminals being brought to justice. 

The movie makes this point several times, in several different ways: 

• Redford and Hoffman are filmed outside the Library of Congress, effectively at a dead end in their leads. They muse in the importance of getting access to a knowledgeable source-and Redford says to Hoffman, “I have a contact at the White House.”
• On the one occasion when Redford actually phones Deep Throat at his office, he is shown in a telephone booth (remember those?) across the street from the Old Executive Office Building, the massive Second Empire building that is the part of the White House compound where most of the White House staff have their offices. Woodward is shown as looking toward the Old EOB when speaking to Deep Throat.
• Several times, when they are to meet in one of their night time rendezvous, Deep Throat is shown in his car leaving the White House gate at the end of West Executive Avenue, which is where the senior staff had coveted parking spaces. (The most senior staff, of course, had offices in the West Wing, whose entry was on West Executive Avenue, but they had ‘portal to portal’ limousine service such that they would not have taken their own car to the office.)

A blockbuster hit, it not only made Woodward wealthy, but launched many a writer on a journalistic career hoping to be the next successful investigative reporter.  The story also provided the opportunity for innumerable cocktail conversations over three decades to speculate about Deep Throat’s true identity. 

While I believed it prudent not to talk about my own Watergate involvement, on rare occasions in this same thirty year period-usually after admitting I had been the lawyer on Nixon’s staff who had finalized the White House tape transcripts before their publication, I would be asked if I knew Deep Throat’s identity.  I would answer in the affirmative-and conversation would hush and ears would lean inward to finally have confirmed the long-secret identify of that particular member of Nixon’s own staff– the key insider who had so nobly sold him out:  Was it Henry Kissinger, Dean’s deputy Fred Fielding, Zeigler’s assistant Diane Sawyer, or even Mrs. Nixon herself?  I would confide that I-and many others on the defense team believing the leaks had to have originated from within the Department of Justice-had concluded it must have been Mark Felt.  The reaction was uniform:  “Mark Felt, who the heck was he?”  And I would reply, “Why, yes, Mark Felt, the white rat”, which was his behind-the back nickname at the FBI.  As I would launch into an explanation of  why I was so sure, eyes would glaze over and conversation would drift into another direction-because everyone had seen Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman on the hunt-and ‘knew’ as fully as truth could be told, that Deep Throat had to have been a member of Nixon’s White House staff. 

So matters stood for over thirty years:  Woodward conscientiously refused to reveal Deep Throat’s true identity-the hallmark of a great and trustworthy investigative reporter.  That is, until May of 2005, when Mark Felt’s daughter revealed him as Deep Throat-and Woodward rushed a book into print, titled The Secret Man, that confirmed and expanded upon their unique, mentor-like relationship.  By this time, Felt had become senile, couldn’t add any detail to his revelation, and ultimately died late last year without additional comment. 

But here’s the rub the no one seems interested in exploring:  Mark Felt was Acting Director of the Federal Bureau of Information, an agency of the Department of Justice-without any connection to Nixon or his White House staff.  Of course, there remains the underlying question about whether the Deep Throat character was really a composite-but it is relatively clear, by Woodward’s own words, that Mark Felt was his secret source of the government’s investigative information. 

There are several ramifications from this, now fully confirmed, situation: 

• First, far from a whistle blower, Felt was a career bureaucrat, bitter about not being named FBI Director following the death of J. Edgar Hoover-who was venting his disappointment by leaking dynamite information derived from the Department of Justice’s ongoing investigation into the Watergate cover-up. Who cares? Well,
  • Woodward was not printing information from someone within the Nixon White House that knew specifics of the cover-up; he was printing information already known to and under aggressive investigation by the Department of Justice.
  • Put another way, it is now clear that it was the career prosecutors (Earl Silbert, Seymour Glanzer and Donald Campbell) who had broken the cover-up case and were moving swiftly toward a comprehensive indictment-well before Archibald Cox’s appointment as Special Prosecutor.
• Second, it is little wonder Woodward kept Felt’s identity secret:
  • Merely printing information passed along from someone at the heart of a Department of Justice investigation hardly qualifies as the sort of investigative reporting that had won Woodward worldwide acclaim-and made him rich and famous.
  • What Felt did-leaking information from an on-going investigation-was not only illegal and improper, it could well have slowed the progress of the investigation itself (by alerting participants and their defense counsel to actions being taken by their former colleagues). Perhaps as important, Felt had compounded his offense: He had retired from the FBI in 1973, shortly after Haldeman, Erhlichman and John Dean had been forced to resign; but following the 1974 publication of the book, he had been subjected to a hostile, aggressive FBI interview (at a Washington hotel room rented for that occasion), during which he specifically denied being the Deep Throat of Woodward’s book. His patiently false answers to FBI questions-especially after being informed of his risk–subjected him to further criminal prosecution.

I was a lawyer on Nixon’s White House staff for five years-and Fred Buzhardt’s principle deputy during the Watergate defense effort that began in earnest following the Haldeman/ Ehrlichman/Dean resignations.  I am quite confident that, but for Woodward printing Felt’s revelation without attribution (or even indication that they came from within the Department of Justice’s own ongoing investigation), the promised comprehensive criminal indictment for the Watergate cover-up would have come in the summer of 1974 and the nation (regardless of who was included in that indictment) would have been spared a fully year of agony-and all of the political intrigue I documented in my recent book. 

The movie’s lie, perpetrated as Woodward stood silent for three decades, is almost universally accepted as true.  So much so that no one really cared when Deep Throat’s identity became known.-Such is the enduring power of a hit movie’s falsehood.