Deep Throat comes out of the closet

As Winston Smith noted long ago, keeping history up to date is a full-time job. It’s good that we in America are blessed with a vigilant media that takes care of the job. When W. Mark Felt recently came forward to name himself as the erstwhile informant in the Watergate scandal, the right-wing loonies seized the opportunity to rewrite the history of the Vietnam War in today’s context.

Deep Throat and Genocide by Ben Stein provides a truly stunning summary of Nixon and the Vietnam War, claiming that Nixon was just about the second coming of Jesus who “lied so he could stay in office and keep his agenda of peace going”. He was so unbelievably dedicated to peace that he “would never have let [the Khmer Rouge]” come to power. Woodward & Bernstein, the two reporters who cracked open the Watergate case, along with their informant, Felt, are responsible for creating “the conditions necessary for the Cambodian genocide”. Well, as a powerful man once said, “The great mass of people … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” In other words, don’t quibble with the details; rewrite history wholesale and no one will believe you’d dare lie about something so important.

What’s more interesting is that this “interpretation” of Vietnam-era history is being pitched across the board. Buchanan, Limbaugh, Stein blame… (Media Matters) quotes Pat Buchanan (on MSNBC) saying that the “[p]eople that (sic) brought down Nixon also resulted in the fall of South Vietnam”. Peggy Noonan also got the memo and managed to wrap a lot of words around it as quoted in Peggy Noonan on crimes against History and Humanity (Talking Points Memo): “Nixon’s ruin led to … the crude and humiliating abandonment of Vietnam and the Vietnamese, the rise of a monster named Pol Pot, and millions—millions—killed in his genocide.”
Rush Limbaugh pared his copy of the talking points down to these few masterful sentences:

“Had they not brought down Nixon, we wouldn’t have lost Vietnam. Had [they] not brought down Nixon, the Khmer Rouge would not have come to power and murdered two million people in a full-fledged genocide.”

As with all talking points, these quotes sound almost exactly alike and espouse a heretofore-unheard-of ideology. With Nixon out of the way, America was fresh out of heroes willing to sacrifice their careers to save the gooks from Pol Pot. Whatever. In fact, it was purely Nixon’s machismo that kept almost 600,000 US troops from abandoning Vietnam. Had Nixon been allowed to remain, the entire Southeast Asian peninsula would be onc giant slice of heaven right now.

What’s behind this new push to further sanctify Nixon (in the same way that any discussion of Reagan turns into a hagiography)? It is most likely a desire to further pacify an already almost totally cowed press. The context at the time was overwhelmingly in favor of leaving Vietnam and removing Nixon. There was no bullshit about a liberal press that had gone too far. Nowadays, with the unlearning of history in America complete, Ben Stein can ask “[c]an anyone even remember now what Nixon did?” and America proudly answers with a resounding “no”. The few that dissemble can be mocked and ignored. That’s why these people feel so safe in just making shit up. They can simultaneously sanctify a tarnished Republican president and warn today’s press that they will be to blame for genocide, if not worse, if they so much as question the Bush administration.

From Gag Reflex by Zack Parsons (Something Awful):

“It’s a concerted effort to revise history and demonize Felt and the criminal liberal media for attacking a hero like Richard Nixon. Such a rewrite of history would prove beneficial to the current Republican government’s non-stop efforts to reduce the Fourth Estate to something like a one-legged puppy chained to a tree made out of lit dynamite.”

The liberal interpretation is almost uniformly a plea for another Deep Throat today, to reveal the arguably more evil doings of the current administration. Stop whining. What about Abu Ghraib? What about the people coming forward from Guantanamo Bay? Or the Afghanistan prisons? There is plenty of information being revealed today; there is just nosingle informant to credit. A lot of the news leaks out slowly, gaining momentum as it’s transmitted over the Internet, and the large media organizations mostly follow instead of leading when exposing crime. All whining aside, we are getting news much faster than before, regardless of how brutally and completely the administration seeks to quash it. In America, there is still a very clean version of events in the Iraq War. The National Review (another right-wing rag massively out of touch with reality) recently published an entire magazine devoted to how we’re winning the war there. The intense focus put on these fabrications makes sure that people don’t notice how atrocious and spiteful the President’s last press conference was.

You’ve got to hand it to them: they’ve got it all figured out. It’s a lot faster to just crack out article after article if you just make shit up and skip the research. Research and numbers are for liberal pussies. With the time left over, you’ve got time to start banning books. A good first step is to make a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. It shouldn’t be too surprising to see the Communist Manifesto top the list (Marx is in the top ten twice, just to make sure no one forgets how evil communism is), but they’ve also managed to get Kinsey (people enjoying sex? What are you, f___ing nuts?), Betty Friedan (whose crime is “disparag[ing] traditional stay-at-home motherhood”) and John Maynard Keynes (whose economic theories include “healthy deficits” and other socialist claptrap). Poor Charlie Darwin got two honorable mentions for his efforts, as did Margaret Mead, Ralph Nader (anti-corporate peacenik socialist …), Rachel Carson (blabbermouth bitch) and B.F. Skinner.

That’s a lot of hating to do. Can you imagine how wonderful a world without worker’s, women’s, children’s rights would be? They’re books. Good ones. By mostly brilliant people who’ve contributed a lot to society. Even if every television and radio and website is screaming that this list means something, it does not. The people have long since spoken in regards to these books and people. Most people are happy that these people existed and contributed to the world, even if they don’t know it. The opinions expressed by the small-minded twits that blame newspapers for Pol Pot or make lists of harmful books are an extreme minority.

The biggest favor you can do yourself is not to ignore the loudmouthed haters. Far better to read them and laugh at them for the buffoons that they are. For, as a truly great American, Mark Twain, said “[a]gainst the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.”