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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us June 9, 2005 Commentary The Deap Moat crowds still enabling You can take the Nixon crowd out of Watergate, but even in a new century, you can’t wring the Watergate out of the Nixon crowd. Rob Asghar When an aging Deep Throat emerged from the shadows after three decades of silence and denial, he was greeted by Deep Moat, an angry mob still enthusiastic about its role as protector of a flawed leader. These men had sought to drown in a pool of obstruction anyone who dared invade their fortress of unrestrained power — and even the most reformed and enlightened of the president’s men, former special counsel Charles Colson, still struggles to “get it.” “He (Deputy FBI Director Mark Felt) had the trust of America’s leaders, and to think that he betrayed that trust is hard for me to fathom,” Colson told The Associated Press. In World, an evangelical Christian magazine, he added, “I did not think that Deep Throat would be the deputy director of the FBI, that he would stoop to that.” This, from a man who once stooped to pressuring Felt to help him falsely clear Nixon of campaign finance misdeeds. Yet, let’s not be surprised. These tantrums are all too human. “You often see a kind of loyalty in organizations and in politics that reminds me of the loyalty you seen in addicted or codependent families,” Joanne Weidman, a marital and family therapist in Pasadena, Calif., told me. Within this dynamic, loyalists convince themselves and others that Daddy’s not passed out drunk, he’s, well, just very tired and needs a nap. That kind of loyalty “can be blind and boundary-less, completely accepting of whatever ‘Daddy’ — in whatever form he takes — offers as truth,” Weidman said. “But sometimes someone is bold enough to say, ‘Hey, Dad isn’t asleep — he’s passed out.’ They do this despite the risk of being ostracized by the family as dangerous, precisely because they’re telling the truth. “Yet that person realizes that, after years of trying to get Mom to do something about Dad’s problem, Mom’s complicity is part of the problem, and therefore Mom, the seemingly appropriate channel, can’t help.” Once someone in the family or inner circle lets out the dark secret, the loyalists are indignant about Dad and themselves being brought to shame. The responses are predictable. To carry the analogy further: “Daddy is no worse than anyone else. Heck, LBJ drank a lot, and JFK drank too much, and Clinton drank everyone under the table. Why doesn’t everybody worry about those jerks, instead?” Loyalists also try to shift the focus from their disgraced leader to the imperfect motives of the dissident or whistle-blower. The Deep Moat protectors of Nixon argue that Mark Felt was vindictive after being passed up by Nixon for the top FBI job. Probably, but any jealousy was justifiable given how that job went to the acquiescent L. Patrick Gray, who as Felt once put it, was “sharing all the Bureau’s knowledge with the White House staff.” What about the codependent insistence of the Deep Moat crowd that Felt could have averted a national disaster if he had dealt with matters in-house, instead of going to the media? First, given that many of these insiders modeled Martha Stewart’s summer collection of prison stripes for manipulating justice, they should be less certain that matters could have been handled effectively on the inside. Second, politics, like all of life, is messy. There are no perfect saints. The belief that Felt should have handled matters differently is a recipe not for reform, but for paralysis — and blind loyalists want nothing more than to paralyze everyone who could touch their leader, no matter how flawed that leader is. Republicans certainly do not have the market cornered on blind loyalty. It’s a two-party system, as the Democratic reaction to Monica-gate reminds us. Codependency allows well-meaning men and women to naively stand behind flawed or incompetent leaders in politics, businesses, churches and synagogues, and PTAs. Most of the time, this blind loyalty is seen as a virtue — rarely is it seen properly as the handmaiden of evil, and only rarely does it reach Deep Moat proportions in which justice is duly meted out to its practitioners. We as a society often speak of needing better leaders, but the re-emergence of the Deep Moat crowd reminds us that what we truly need is to become a better breed of followers. 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