W. Mark Felt/Deep Throat

I'm not a huge Ann Coulter fan. She can be funny, but usually she comes off extremely mean-spirited, and in the end, I'm not sure she's advancing the cause of the Right very much. Much in the same way that Howard Dean elicits laughs from extremely partisan audiences by feigning a coke-snorting Rush Limbaugh (which is weird, as Limbaugh as addicted to oxycontin, not cocaine), Coulter says and writes similar low-blow stuff about liberals. Like a meal at McDonalds, it can be gratifying at the moment that you're eating it, but makes you feel regretful and slightly sick thereafter. That said, she's made some interesting and insightful observations regarding W. Mark Felt in this week's column. To wit:

-That without Mark Felt leaking pertinent info to Woodward and consequently bringing down Nixon, we would've never had a president like Jimmy Carter enter into the White House. Ford was seen as an extension of the Nixon Administration, and Carter's election was a whipsaw reaction to the Watergate scandal. Where the irony of this comes into play is that Carter's Justice Department turned around and prosecuted Mark Felt for authorizing the FBI to break into the houses of members of the violently radical Weather Underground terrorist organization. Who happens to testify in his defense? None other than Richard M. Nixon. Felt is convicted; he gets a full pardon from Ronald Reagan.

-I found this one to be rather amusing; I'll post it in Ann's own words:

Also ironic is that Felt's free-love, flower-girl daughter was estranged from her father for decades on account of her rejection of conventional bourgeois institutions like marriage. Now she is broke — because of her rejection of conventional bourgeois institutions like marriage. (Too bad she didn't follow Pop's advice to "follow the money.")


There's obviously more to this than these two blurbs, but sans the cheap shots, there's some substance to her observations regarding this W. Mark Felt/Deep Throat story. You can read it here, if you want the full article.