I think that some of you may be jumping to conclusions regarding Bob Woodward and the latest revelations concerning Plamegate. Some of you seem to think that ole Bob may be potentially be something of a whore for trying to engineer a cover up when in his younger years he had a reputation for exposing them instead.
I suggest that there may be another explanation for Woodward's seemingly contradictory behaviour. It's not that fame has changed our Bob. Rather, he's exactly the same person he's always been: a neocon.
People have always assumed that Woodward's main purpose behind his Watergate reporting was to help expose the corruption within the White House.
In fact, there might have been another reason for doing so: to bring down Nixon.
Nixon was never particularly popular within the extreme right wing of the Republican party, for a couple reasons.
One, he was in many ways an outsider : Nixon wasn't born to money and certainly wasn't part of the Eastern establishment on which the GOP rested at the time.
Two, his decision to officially recognize Red China was viewed by many in the GOP, including a governor from California named Ronald Reagan, as a betrayal.
So I think it's entirely possible that we're mis-reading Woodward's motivations in this. We keeping thinking that he's sold out, when in fact he might have never have been on 'our' side to begin with.
Woodward might be just have been involved in a plot from inside the GOP to begin down Nixon for having strayed too far from the unofficial path of the true blue core of the Republican party. A plot brought about by people we'd identify today as being 'neo-cons'.
Plausible? Or have I been wrapping the tinfoil a little too tightly lately?