Throat Job

by Matt Taibbi

I've seen some horseshit in my time, but I'm not sure I've ever seen anything quite like last week's Newsweek cover story on Deep Throat, by Evan Thomas.

The Thomas piece is remarkable on a number of levels, not the least being its frank and undisguised hypocrisy: Evan Thomas was one of the figures involved in the Koran-toilet-unnamed-sources fuck-up, and so an article written by him that denounces as unpatriotic the "legacy" of America's most famous unnamed source is humorous from the outset.

Thomas halfheartedly attempts a revisionist history of Watergate, arguing that the scandal was just an ordinary power struggle in which Nixon's part was that of a Capra-esque outsider president trying, quite reasonably, to assert his independence from an entrenched Democratic Party bureaucracy that was the Washington legacy of FDR. Thomas makes it sound like all Nixon was trying to do was break big-government gridlock. This is hilarious stuff, but it pales in comparison to the meat of the article.