Scorning “Deep Throat”

InstaPunk takes a rather large rhetorical stick to the notion that Mark Felt (aka the “Deep Throat” of Watergate fame that recently unmasked himself) in any way, shape or form represents a “hero” (a term being bandied about 24-hour cable networks like it was going out of style):

What part of this rite of passage can we connect with Mark Felt? Almost none of it. He was no underling. Rather, he was a very powerful executive who could have made a huge impact by going public as soon as he objected to the goings on in his organization. Did he? No. He chose a route so sleazy that even the men whose careers he helped make gave him a nickname borrowed from a dirty movie. Did he come forward after the presidential downfall he worked to effect had been accomplished? No. He remained at the FBI because his career there was more important to him than helping to salve the national wounds that have continued to fester ever since. The character he most resembles is the phantom sniper who, according to 40 years of conspiracy theories, got away with the assassination of John F. Kennedy: he hides in the shadows to bring down a U.S. president, then disappears without ever having to account for his deeds. He’s a creature of the dark, a dishonorable self-aggrandizing weasel, a well-connected coward, a snitch.

Harsh words, but I think they may be deserved.
UPDATE: Ed Driscoll posits that the institution most affected by Watergate was not the government, but rather the press itself:

You could make the case that unlike Richard Nixon (who as Chris Matthews once said, spent the rest of his life rebuilding his image and reworking it into that of an elder statesman in anticipation of his death, with arguable degrees of success), and the Republicans (who spent four years in the wilderness only to reemerge triumphantly with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980), the press has never recovered from Watergate. The same impulses that drove Woodward and Bernstein and the Post to bring down the hated Nixon and cause America to abandon Vietnam have been amped-up exponentially in their war against President Bush and America’s war on terror–but with disastrous results for the media: circulation has fallen dramatically in recent years, the Blogosphere is running rings around them, and any shred of the appearance of neutrality or objectivity ended by the time the presidential election was over in November.
That’s obviously not the lesson that the media takes from Watergate of course, but it’s worth noting that critics such as Epstein were trying to point out the media’s hubris even as early as 30 years ago.