GREG SCOBLETE wonders if the current outbreak of Deep Throat nostalgia isn’t based on the media’s current troubles. “This is the perfect chance to relive – in Al Bundy-like fashion – the Big One.”

Of course, it’s not so clear that the story reflects as well on the press as some think.

UPDATE: InstaPunk has thoughts on Mark Felt.

And Austin Bay observes that “conspiracy theorists of another era would have a field day with a J. Edgar Hoover protege bringing down a president.”

Yep. I don’t mind Nixon going — I think he was a pretty lousy President for all sorts of reasons aside from Watergate — but it’s obvious that the simplistic Woodward & Bernstein hero-tale is a bit, um, incomplete.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ben Stein offers a defense of Nixon, but I’m unpersuaded. And his historical claim that Felt, Woodward, Bernstein, et al., laid the foundation for the Cambodian genocide seems a bit hysterical. I think it’s also ahistorical, as I don’t see any reason to think that events in Cambodia would have gone differently had Nixon finished his term.

MORE: Stephen Bainbridge has more thoughts on Deep Throat and anonymous sourcing: “Might we not have evaluated Woodward and Bernstein’s work with a more informed eye if we knew they were being fed stories by somebody with a bureaucratic axe to grind?”