BUST OUT SOME MORE TINY VIOLINS

It seems that the Plumbers aren't happy with Mark Felt:

Aides to the late president Richard Nixon have said that former FBI deputy director Mark Felt, unmasked as the anonymous Watergate source known as "Deep Throat," had breached professional ethics by leaking information.

G. Gordon Liddy, a Nixon operative who engineered the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Campaign headquarters in the Watergate building in Washington, and served four and a half years in jail for it, said Wednesday that Felt "violated the ethics of the law enforcement profession."

"If he possessed evidence of wrongdoing, he was honor-bound to take that to a grand jury and secure an indictment, not to selectively leak it to a single news source," Liddy, now a popular conservative radio talk show host, told CNN television.

Nice of Liddy to cast the first stone there. Frankly, I don't want to hear these guys talking about honor, or for that matter about honor and ethics.

Who else came out of the woodwork?

Chuck Colson, the head of White House communications in 1972, Felt could have helped America avoid a wrenching political crisis, the ripple effect of which was felt in the country for decades, if he had gone through proper channels.

"Mark Felt could have stopped Watergate," said Colson, who served time in jail and is now an evangelical Christian broadcaster. "He was in a position of that kind of influence. Instead, he goes out and basically undermines the administration."

I coulda sworn that the Nixon administration undermined itself by breaking the law. But that's just me, I could be wrong. After all, I'm not an evangelical Christian.

The real reason Colson and Liddy are upset that Mark Felt did what he did clandestinely is that doing so didn't give the Nixon administration a chance to slime him. Remember, Colson is the man who brought us John O'Neill.

Former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan, in an appearance on MSNBC television, bluntly said Felt was a "traitor."

Adding, "I'm really disappointed that it wasn't me. That would've been SO COOL!"

The article quotes David Gergen as being "relieved" that the guessing game is over. So there you have it: of the Nixon aides interviewed, only one has a decent sense of history. Okay, so that one aide didn't go to jail. However, Liddy and Colson didn't go to jail because of Deep Throat, they went to jail because of their own actions.

Patrick Fitzgerald, you're up...