Bueller?

Via Andrew Sullivan, here’s former Nixon speechwriter (and Ferris’s economics teacher) Ben Stein completely losing his shit:

We read that Mark Felt’s family and Mark Felt put out their story solely to make money off it. So, this makes the family’s karma even more unnerving. The father, patriarch, Mark, took out his anger and frustration for being passed over at the FBI, by ruining the career of the peacemaker, Richard Nixon. So, he condemned a whole subcontinent to genocide and slavery and poverty to please his own wounded vanity. (Maybe his nickname should be “sour grapes” and not “deep throat” because he has as much in common with that fox as with a porn star.) And, blood will tell, as the old saying goes: his posterity is now dragging out his old body and putting it on display to make money. (Have you noticed how Mark Felt looks like one of those old Nazi war criminals they find in Bolivia or Paraguay? That same, haunted, hunted look combined with a glee at what he has managed to get away with so far?)

And it gets worse: it’s been reported that Mark Felt is at least part Jewish. The reason this is worse is that at the same time that Mark Felt was betraying Richard Nixon, Nixon was saving Eretz Israel. It is a terrifying chapter in betrayal and ingratitude. If he even knows what shame is, I wonder if he felt a moment’s shame as he tortured the man who brought security and salvation to the land of so many of his and my fellow Jews. Somehow, as I look at his demented face, I doubt it.

[snip]

There is a lot of debate about whether or not Mark Felt was a hero. Obviously, I don’t think so. I think the hero was Richard Nixon, fighting for peace even as he was being horribly mistreated and crucified just for his fight for peace.

Yes, poor, mistreated, misunderstood Nixon Christ. He fought for peace and was crucified for it. I really think Stein should experiment with not taking peyote before he writes.

And no, actually, I’ve not noticed Felt’s resemblance to one of those old Nazi war criminals, but then again I’m neither a dyed-in-the-wool, completely in the bag Nixon toadie, nor am I utterly batshit insane, so, um…yeah.

As to Ben’s very unfortunate, frothing rant on Felt’s status as a traitor to Israel, I’ll confess to feeling a bit apprehensive about even engaging with a psychosis of this depth. In my experience, as someone who spends a fair bit of time reading about and researching the Israel-Palestine situation, it’s unfortunately not all that uncommon to see hardline right-wing Jews slander their liberal Jewish brothers and sisters with charges of Naziism or “Hitlerism” when they’re deemed insufficiently pro-Israel (It’s true that the “Nazi war criminal” crack and the “traitor to Israel” charge are not necessarily connected in Stein’s piece, but I’m positive that this wouldn’t make the least difference to Stein or others were a left-wing critic to make similar remarks.) That Stein bases his attack, which is offensive regardless of Felt’s ethnicity, on vague “reports” of Felt being “at least part Jewish” just makes it all the more ridiculous.

I’m curious to know who it was that “reported” Felt’s Jewishness to Stein? Could it have been old Tricky Dick himself? Or did he just get it from the Watergate tapes he listens to while “relaxing” in the bathtub? From a Guardian story on the Felt revelation:

When the Deep Throat leaks began to appear in the Washington Post, the White House began to wonder about Mr Felt’s loyalty. In one of the tapes of Oval office conversations, secretly recorded by the paranoid president, Nixon swore he would “fire the whole goddam bureau” and singled out Mr Felt.

“Is he a Catholic?” he asked his aide, HR Haldeman, according to the account in Vanity Fair. Haldeman replied, wrongly, that Mr Felt was Jewish, setting the president off on one of his characteristic anti-Semitic rants.

“Christ,” Nixon said, “[The bureau] put a Jew in there?… It could be the Jewish thing. I don’t know. It’s always a possibility.”

How, oh how could that demented-faced devil Felt have so tortured such a dear, sweet man as this?

I’m not aware of Nixon doing much to help Israel during the time when Felt was “betraying” him, which was roughly from June through September 1972. The Yom Kippur War, which transformed the U.S.-Israel relationship, did not begin until October 1973, over a year later, and in any event Nixon’s policy of supplying arms to Israel was clearly intended more to counterbalance the Soviets, who were supplying Egypt, than it was to “save Eretz Israel.”

It’s known that Nixon distinguished between American Jews (left-wing, dope-smoking, media-controlling, homosexual pornographers) and Israeli Jews (tough, plucky, preferable to darker skinned Arabs, and, most importantly, in Israel) in his bigotry, but Stein’s attempt to cast such a demonstrated and enthusiastic anti-Semite as Nixon as Israel’s savior is quite a bit more than stupidity on stilts, it’s stupidity on stilts pedaling backwards on a unicycle, clanging great, shiny bells and wearing a birthday cake for a hat.

Lord, I need a drink.