"Deep Throat" and Press Integrity Die

Mark Felt, Farewell...and A Few Questions


Farewell, Mark Felt. You were a hero. You've left for another place. You held high values of honor and of loyalty to the Constitution, rather than just to a man or a boss. I salute the patriot who has passed, who dared alert the Press to a corruption in a Presidency that needed scrutiny.

But, Mark, I wish I could have had a chance to speak with you about where the bulldogs of the Press were in 2008, and where they chose to go and not to go. Press integrity seems to have died with you. For a man will be President in a matter of weeks who is associated with political gangsters in Illinois, with Weather Underground terrorists, with anti-Semitic PLO spokesmen, and with black racists and racism. But the the Press wouldn't follow those stories Mark, and I'm wondering, as I remember your "Deep Throat" chapter in American History, I'm wondering how this could have happened. Only Aaron Burr had worse associations--he most likely was in the pay of the Spanish government. But let me get back to the point.

Mark, your role came during the Nixon Presidency. I remember it clearly. I had returned to the United States in August of 1968 after two years in Asia. I remember being scared and shaken by the shooting of James Meredith, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. America was at war with something within itself, I saw from afar in Bangkok with an odd war nearby in Vietnam raging.

The sixties spilled into the seventies like a bunch of drunks into the streets at closing time. Bad clothes, bad hair, bad politics. An emboldened Left marched even further Left, keeping company with Communists and terrorists, screaming Stop The War and picking fights with law and order on college campuses all around the country. Kent State erupted in tragic riot and gunfire on May 4th, 1970 that killed four students, widening the rift between generations and Political Parties. Then, came the Presidential Campaign of 1972.

Mark, you then gave us the expurgation that was the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, though it would be decades before we knew you. The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
put the heat on the President. He was forced resign the Presidency in disgrace. The War finally over, we had a hangover from it all including a fuel crisis from our friends the Arabs. A White Knight called Jimmy Carter to make it all better in 1976. What a disaster that turned out to be.

The Post's efforts to get at the truth and the movie that followed seemed to give America back it's soul. We didn't want a scheming, conniving, law-breaking tyrant in the White House. The Press would fight for us. As Hollywood indicates in Three Days of the Condor, when minor CIA contractor Joseph Turner a.k.a. Condor played by dashing Robert Redford, from the James Grady story, lets evil assassin G. Joubert played by Max von Sydow know that he is about to tell all to the New York Times...

Fast Forward here, Mark. What a different world it is in 2008. The Press corps flipped for Barack Obama like never before in history. Senator John McCain named Sara Palin, Governor of Alaska as his running mate, and the Press stormed her home town of Wasilla, Alaska, turning over stones for weeks and weeks, looking for...something, anything to topple her positive affect upon the McCain campaign.

Why else?

Meanwhile, in 2008 in Springfield Illinois, the man Barack Obama helped re-elect, Rod Blagojevich, was miring himself deeper and deeper in the legendary political corruption of that state, completely without any press scrutiny, as he merrily marched to his destined date with the Federal Bureau of Investigation last week, when he was arrested and charged with corruption.

Why, Mark? The only thing I can come up with is this: Blagojevich and all the elements of Barack Obama's Illinois origins were off-limits, because it would have damaged the Democratic Nominee had the truth of the extent of corruption in Illinois and Chicago ever come out.

The Press corps wanted a change in the White House--a change of Party. Obama was their darling from the beginning, ignoring and dissing political heavy weight Hillary Clinton, junior Senator from New York, all the while legitimizing Barack Obama's nasty baggage.

Mark, there was so much to look at, too. We have Obama's lies and about-faces with his past associations with self-confessed and un-repentant terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn: 1. I don't know them. 2. They're just some people in the neighborhood. 3. I know them. 4. They did things once that I don't agree with. 5. I thought they were "rehabilitated." Bernadine Dohrn once said of the Manson murders: "Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach! Wild!"


Mark, we are all saddled now with a President who will be linked forever with that utterance, and we along with that have a Press corps that neither understands nor cares that someone connected to such statements should never be associated with the office of the Presidency.

Ms. Dohrn, though, wasn't done in the 60s and 70s, nor was husband Bill. She became wanted for questioning in the Nyack Brinks Job, in which the Weather Underground and Black Panthers murdered three veterans of the American military, one a Brinks Security Guard, Peter Paige 49, father of three, and Nyack police officers Waverly Brown, 45 father of two, and Ed O'Grady 33, father of three (O'Grady-Brown Memorial Fund). The terrorists were well armed and had body armor. Brown was shot at close range with a 9mm pistol as he lay wounded. She refused to cooperate, and fled, leading to her warrant of arrest. Ultimately she wasn't charged. But interesting that she was in New York at the time, according to many reports. Even more interesting was the adoption of the child of two of the convicted bank robbers. Two founding members of the Weather Underground, adopting a child of fellow group members, but having nothing to do with the crime? They had something to do with it, if for no other reason than having founded the group.

So, Mark, we have a president-elect with such friends. Interesting it is, too, that the Brinks Job plan was among other things to distribute money to black causes and organizations. Kind of what Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, and the Dohrn/Ayers' were doing with that Annenberg Grant money. Bill Ayers said about that project to set up "alternative" educational opportunities in Chicago the wanted to tell those young black people "what this country is really all about."

Mark, I'm wondering, why didn't the Press scour those neighborhoods and find out what Reverend Wright, Ayers, and the Obamas were telling those children?

You talked about honor, and honoring the Constitution in explaining your "Deep Throat" role, Mark. What does America care of that, today? In New York, the sitting governor is David Paterson, a legally blind black man. He took office when faux crusader Eliot Spitzer was caught with a high-priced hooker. But Paterson admits immediately that he was having it off with state employees, and that he had given jobs to some of them.

That was in May. Still no calls for his resignation from the New York Times, who was poised there with Robert Redford in 1975 to save us from mad-dog CIA killers; nor from the Washington Post, who in reality took a law-breaking U.S. President out.

Mark, perhaps even worse is, that David Paterson, who will fill a Senate seat soon, doesn't even understand that he is, by virtue of his admission of peccadillo, unfit to govern. President Elect Barack Obama, who has to check with his attorney to see if he spoke to Governor-gangster Rod Blagojevich about filling his vacant Illinios Senate seat, doesn't understand, either, how inappropriate he is.

For you see, Mark Felt, the Press didn't hold up the mirror for them. And they sold us out, and that means the mad-dog killers and corrupt Politicians are going to get a free ride. Deborah Howell, public ombudsman for the Washington Post, wrote in article headlined "An Obama Tilt in Campaign Coverage," that "(s)tories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain. Post reporters, photographers and editors -- like most of the national news media -- found the candidacy of Obama, the first African-American major-party nominee, more newsworthy and historic."

Historic...and carrying their pre-history around like a loaded gun, they snuffed out the competition and stayed away from the real story, the story of who is Barack Obama, and why does he say in his autobiography that white people's greed puts the world in need, and what was he doing with Governor Rod Blagojevich two years ago, and what was he doing with Reverend Wright for twenty years, and what was he doing with and for Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, and what was he doing with Ayers, Dohrn and Rashid Khalidi in that video that the Tribune Corporation buried in its vault?

To hell with all of it, Mark. The Press doesn't know what it's job is anymore. It has become the tool of a political party, and its cornerstone virtues of honor and truth have perished in the transformation.

Rest in peace. Though with that corpse labeled "Press Integrity" next to you, I don't see how you will.

Yes You Can

When you've worked hard to keep the candidate who won from getting there, it can be a very dark day, indeed.

However large the disappointment in the outcome of the 2008 Presidential election for McCain backers like myself, we must all embrace the symbolic achievement of the accession of a man of color to the Presidency of the United States.

Whether this is the right man (and he's not), or whether the campaign coverage was fair and balanced (and it wasn't) is all fodder for a different day. Today is the day to tell all Americans that there is nothing you cannot achieve in this country. (You don't even have to be honest.)

As I told my High School History classes yesterday, "No matter who you wanted to win, the fact remains that America elected a Black man to be President of the United States, and that fact is the most significant positive event in the political history of the United States of America. There cannot be a Black man or women, or of any ethnicity, for that matter, than can now have any doubts about what they can achieve in this country, if they work hard for it and plan carefully."

Americans, as Obama's victory speech proclaimed, "Yes we can." We can, here, accomplish almost anything we set out to do.

Congratulations, Barack Obama. You have broken through what may have seemed like a barrier of race to many people of color, whether it was real or imagined.

McCain Takes On The Press

Wednesday July 23, 2008
by James A. Bridge

Senator John McCain yesterday squared off against his biggest obstacle to the Presidency--the mainstream media of the United States of America.

The Media Is In Love campaign is a brilliant move in a campaign that has been dragged into the shadows by the editors, publishers and producers of every stripe of the media. Both print and broadcast media have isolated the McCain campaign while chasing after Barack Obama where ever he goes, trumpeting whatever he says. The happy, light slap at the media was done with a call to supporters to vote for one of two videos he will run as adverts: "The Media Is In Love With Barack", version one to the music "Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You", version two, "My Eyes Adored You," both played to identical snippets of Press Icons not only pandering to Senator Obama, but offering words of worship, devotion, and outright infatuation.

Infatuation means, from the Latin: "in a foolish state." And how foolish they all seem, our so-called "news" purveyors.

Brian Williams and Chris Matthews lead the pack of nowhere-near-unbiased media giants as they utter their disgraceful, auto-hypnotic revelations about personal affinity for the mere presence of Barack Obama, and the sound of his voice. Williams: "It's hard to be objective." Matthews, when not weeping about how much he is moved by Obama, says he "feels a thrill coming up his leg." He says he doesn't get it too often. (I'll reserve further comment on that.)

The McCain Press-attack campaign is perfectly timed. Ohio polls reveal that 51 percent of Ohioans think that reporters are trying to get Obama elected. (From Rasmussen Reports (http://rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/election_20082/2008_presidential_election/ohio/election_2008_ohio_presidential_election ) The buzz on the street is that the Press is disgracing itself in ignoring all the issues, while centering only on their perceived charisma of the Democratic Party's presumptive Nominee.

So enamored of him are they that they miss the obvious. Barack Obama has lounged in his journeys to Afghanistan and Iraq upon the soft pillow of a fawning media circus, while, without their taking any notice, he has reversed prior positions, and has controverted the stated Iraq/Afghanistan War policy of Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean and of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (CA, D 8th) and Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid (NV, D).

Now THAT is big news--"Obama Changes Foreign Policy Position of Democratic Party"..."An Adventure No Longer, Iraq Praises Bush's Iraq Success"..."Obama Will Fight al-Quaeda In Afghanistan."

Will we see it today or this week in print or on the air? Will we hear it on the radio?

(My eyes adored you....)

What is that you're humming, Brian? Chris? No, I doubt we'll see the Press rip at this newly opened seam in the Democratic Party's rhetoric about the War Against Terror.

This is no surprise, though, at this point. The Press have generally refused to either tug at the ugly baggage around the junior Senator form Illinois or press him on his own constant flip-flopping on issues.

Those issues are important ones.

On Iraq: He told the world that the troop surge wouldn't work and that the troops must come home, yet while in Iraq, he praises its success, and tells us that we must move those troops on to Afghanistan.

On Jerusalem: He tells Israelis that Jerusalem will never be divided; as soon as he is off Israeli soil, he comes off that position, calling it "unfortunate wording".

On Iran: "After all, Peru, North Korea and Iran, they're all tiny countries. They don't pose much of a threat to us." THREE DAYS LATER: "I have always said that Iran is a serious threat to the security of this country."

On ignoring--or not noticing--over 20 years the racism of his own close friend and pastor, Reverend Wright. On his friendship with self-confessed Weather Underground bomber William Ayers. On the sweetheart real estate deal he got from convicted contractor Tony Rezko, guilty on 16 counts of fraud and money laundering.

The McCain Campaign used a good bit of humor to challenge the swooning, clearly Obama-biased mainstream media to do their jobs. REPORT THE NEWS. BE OBJECTIVE. ASK TOUGH QUESTIONS.

We demand it. We deserve it. Well done, Senator McCain.