Mixed feelings on the huge news broken yesterday by Vanity Fair about the identity of Deep Throat, former FBI assistant director Mark Felt. On one hand, as a longtime Watergate buff and semi-crusading journalist myself, what a thrill to be around when his identity was finally revealed — kind of like an archaeologist must feel when some Rosetta Stone-like artifact comes to light after years of speculation.

Truly a circle has closed, as the biggest mystery of the Watergate saga is now out in the open (the second biggest mystery being what was in that 18 minutes of erased tape). I hope that this media blitz about Felt will fire up some interest in study of the Watergate era among young voters in this country — especially young journalists whose only experience with “scandal” was the Monica Lewinsky thing.

I have a sinking feeling, however, that in the current repressive American political climate young people will study Watergate less out of a crusading zeal to uncover government impropriety than as a revisionist effort to martyr the Nixon administration as a victim of the media, a la the twin Dan Rather & Newsweek fiascos.

But I do hope to be proven wrong on that.

There are so many delicious ironies surrounding Deep Throat’s unveiling. My first take — shared by the Washington Post’s own Howard Kurtz — was “why the hell is this story being broken by Vanity Fair?”

I’m a fan of the magazine and all — they’ve done some really good investigative work over the years — but come on. The Post itself couldn’t break this?

I also remain skeptical about Bob Woodward in general. As the book Silent Coup points out, Woodward not only had precious little journalistic experience before being hired by the Post and put on the Watergate story, but he was a former communications officer with the Office of Naval Intelligence, with close ties to the U.S. intelligence community, many members of which seemed to have a vested interest in discouraging Nixon on several fronts.

Perhaps the unmasking of Deep Throat is just another red herring. Despite a feeling of completion and symmetry in the revelation of his identity, the truth is that there are many more questions to answer.

The truth is that times have changed immensely since the Watergate days. Richard Nixon — archconservative of his era, almost on a par with Barry Goldwater — couldn’t get nominated as a Republican today. He would be considered too liberal.

And the media has fallen so far since those days it’s painful to watch. There have always been boot-lickers and toadies in my profession, hacks who think a journalist’s job is to suck up to power and help keep a foot on the throats of the downtrodden. But that seems to be the norm these days rather than the exception. The phrase “use it or lose it” certainly applies to freedom of the press. It is a right that must be fought for, because those in power are always fighting against it.

Perhaps the buzz about Deep Throat is simply another of our society’s trysts with nostalgia, as the past is cherry-picked to make the present seem like a more comfortable place.

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Now that SCAD has officially sent their official press release officially confirming the official time and place of the James Brown concert in Forsyth Park this Friday night, I feel officially comfortable in letting you in on the whole silliness surrounding this thing.

Everyone and his brother has known for weeks this concert was going to happen. We’ve had confirmation for nearly three weeks from James Brown’s publicist that the gig was going to happen.

But last week when we talked to SCAD things weren’t quite so clear.

The Kabuki Dance the college’s PR staff often puts us through has become a running joke around the office. Not because the PR staff is in any way unprofessional or incompetent — quite the contrary, they’re very good at their jobs and very nice people to boot — but because they so often feel a need to keep a secret when there is simply no secret to keep anymore.

When our music editor Jim Reed asked a college spokesperson last week — the only one officially allowed to speak on the subject — about the concert, the staffer refused to confirm or deny that James Brown was playing.

However, the staffer did allow that there would be a free concert in Forsyth Park this Friday night.

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After the election I wrote a column called “Apocalypse now?” that got a lot of attention both good and bad, broken down (like everything else these days) pretty much along party lines.

Those on the right side of the fence — and some of the corporate nervous nellies at this newspaper — found the column alarmist, specifically objecting to paragraphs like this:

So prepare for creationism in the schools, racial profiling and censorship — while Iraq burns and the debt rises. Prepare for forced school prayer, illegal abortions and labeling environmentalists as terrorists — while the real terrorists plot the next attack.

I would direct those who found that statement a little hyperbolic to this news report saying that the FBI now considers some environmental and animal rights groups to be the most worrisome trend in terms of domestic terror threats.

Yes, that’s right — tree-huggers and PETA activists are now apparently considered by your federal government to be more dangerous than Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden (Osama who?).

Perhaps the feds are taking their cue from Pat Robertson, who recently said that the U.S. judiciary system is the greatest threat that America has ever faced — a greater threat than the Civil War, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and Al Qaeda, said the addlepated televangelist huckster.

I don’t take the FBI’s opinion at face value here. Obviously they don’t mean what they say — this is just another J. Edgar Hoover-style intimidation tactic, designed to open the doors to federal harassment of politically inconvenient groups.

But then again, why expect the FBI to be immune from the brain-eating disease that’s infected the rest of the federal government?

I wish for once something I said was actually as alarmist as some seem to think. I wish some of these wackos running the country now would prove my harsh rhetoric wrong. I’m getting tired of being right so often.

Someone make me wrong. Please?

Update: Actually I did get something wrong in that post-election column. I wrote:

“When someone I know finds out a family member has Alzheimer

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I took a break from watching the NBA playoffs the other night to watch a little of Platoon on the Spike channel. I had forgotten what a well-rounded cast that movie had, and what a great training ground it was for future stars, like Johnny Depp, John C. McGinley and Forest Whitaker.

Oliver Stone is heavy-handed as always with his symbolism and with his politics — not even George Lucas is a match for him in this — but the movie is still a powerfully made indictment of the Vietnam War.

Early in the movie there’s a sudden scene shift, with an accompanying subtitle indicating that the scene was taking place near the Cambodian border in 1967.

It struck me that the Vietnam War was roughly two years old at that point (it’s hard to figure an exact starting point because of that conflict’s gradual escalation, but the consensus seems to be that 1965 was the point of no return for us).

And it struck me that the Iraq War is a little over two years old now as well.

In 1967, the generals and politicians all said the light was at the end of the tunnel. The Tet offensive was still a year away. Of course the war only dragged on for several more years, becoming ever more horrific in scale and in human suffering.

The Iraq war generals have delivered their share of similarly rose-colored assessments, mostly along the lines of “all these car bombs indicate that we’re actually winning because the enemy’s getting desperate” and “But, but, what about all the schools we put fresh coats of paint on?”

But today the big generals held a press conference in Baghdad with a rare note of realism.

They didn’t say anything people like me haven’t been warning about for several years now: That the insurgency is nowhere near defeated, that the Iraqi government is nowhere near able to stand on its own, that U.S. troops are nowhere near a point where a drawdown and a return home is possible.

But nonetheless, it seems that the worm has turned. It seems that Iraq’s version of a Tet offensive has taken place, with similar results.

It seems that an almost unbelievably complacent American public is beginning at long last to sober up — ever so slightly — and realize what a colossal mistake we made in getting involved in Iraq to begin with and, as in Vietnam, how badly we’ve underestimated the enemy.

But of course, as in Vietnam, the thing has taken on a life of its own. The Iraq war has built a critical mass that no one can stop now until the war’s own internal dynamics are played out.

We are now being prepared — and none too subtly — for an open-ended troop commitment in Iraq, while North Korea boasts about the nukes it has and Iran threatens with nukes it is about to have.

It seems that a future director will have to make another version of Platoon about the Iraq war. We know the ending already.

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It’s really funny how things always come around. It can take a really, really long time, but it always does.

I bet many people think I’m distraught at the whole Newsweek scandal over the questionable-at-best account of U.S. interrogators flushing Korans down the toilet. Distraught because perhaps some imagined liberal media hero of mine got shot down.

They would be wrong.

First off, I let my Newsweek subscription — at the low, low professional discount, no less — lapse several months ago because I was sick and tired of all the lengthy glowing cover stories about how wonderful and brave and smart the current president is.

Newsweek never believed any of that fluff they wrote about Bush. He had just won the election and they were just sucking up. To me that’s worse than being a bad journalist. That’s being a good journalist who intentionally does bad work.

So Newsweek continues — six months later — to beg me by mail to resubscribe. I trash everything they send to me gleefully.

As for the recent destroying of the mag’s reputation by this anonymously sourced Koran story, consider who wrote said anonymously sourced story: One Michael Isikoff, who wrote another famously anonymously sourced story a few years back.

You might remember the story. It involved an intern and a president. It involved multiple anonymous sources, all with massive conflicts of interest and more often than not enormous funding from the right wing.

Isikoff couldn’t be bothered to get reputable sources on the record then, and he can’t be bothered about it now.

As for the larger issue, I tend to agree with what the gay British Republican says:

The fact that the Koran story was immediately so believable to so many people around the world says volumes about how poor America’s reputation is around the world now.

And that part’s not Newsweek’s fault at all. We know whose it is.

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