God, Tom Tomorrow’s strip this week couldn’t be more right-on. Some of it is below; go here for the rest. If you’re not a Salon subscriber, you’ll have to watch an ad first, but it’s worth it.

I’ve been watching MSNBC for the last two hours, and it’s kind of disturbing to see all the old Nixon thugs come out of the woodwork. With numbing predictability, Pat Buchanan has been ranting like the odious brat he is, insisting over and over again that Deep Throat was a traitor and possibly a criminal. And now Chris Matthews is talking to that upstanding citizen Chuck Colson. I’m sure that if Ehrlichman and Haldeman were still alive, all the networks would be giving them the elder-statesman treatment—instead of the public whipping that they, and all the others, deserve. This is why I almost never watch TV news.

This seems like a perfect moment to post one of the best publication covers in my personal collection. I acquired the excellent artifact at left in 1997, during a year I spent living and working in D.C. One day in the late spring or early summer, I was sitting on a bench in Dupont Circle during my lunch hour when a homeless guy walked over to me with the complete Washington Post from August 9, 1974—the day after Nixon stepped down. This guy didn’t just have the front page or the front section from that historic day—he had the whole paper. He offered to sell it to me for $20. I offered him $10, and we had a deal.

Oh, jeez, I’ve still got MSNBC on, and I’m starting to get a little terrified. At the moment, the panel consists of Al Haig, Gordon Liddy, Joe Scarborough, Monica Crowley, and Pat Buchanan. Of course all these people are going to criticize Felt for what he did. Why not elicit the opinions of some prominent Nixon antagonists from the Watergate era—the Republicans and Democrats and independents who actually worked hard to ensure that a reckless, criminal administration was held accountable for its crimes? Oh, wait, I know the answer: Because it’s TV news.

In 1992, The Atlantic Monthly published a classic article by James Mann that laid out a convincing theory regarding the identity of Deep Throat, the famously anonymous Woodstein source who helped bring down the Nixon Administration. Mann believed there was a good chance that Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt, the No. 2 or No. 3 man at the FBI during the Watergate years. I first read Mann’s article in about 1996—near the beginning of my long and enduring obsession with Watergate—and I found his case far more convincing than most of the other Deep Throat theories that had been bandied around since 1974. (Kissinger? Come on. L. Patrick Gray? A bumbling functionary who was totally out of his depth at the FBI. Al Haig, William Rehnquist, Diane Sawyer? Shut up and stop wasting my time.) Partly because of Mann’s article, and despite the existence of a handful of other strong candidates, I’ve spent the last decade believing that Felt was Deep Throat. As it turns out, he was.

Until not long ago, the Mann article was freely accessible on the Atlantic’s website. But sometime in the last year or two, the magazine began hiding the article behind a subscription wall. Now, for obvious reasons, the article is public again, and you should go read it.

In a series of articles for Slate since 1999, Timothy Noah had also been a strong proponent of the Felt theory.