Ben Stein's Thoughts on Mark Felt

This is a great column by Ben Stein about Mark "Deep Throat" Felt. Kathryn Lopez at NRO linked to it. Ben Stein titled his special report in The American Spectator "I Don't Feel for Felt."

It brings up some great points about the whole situation:

• Mark Felt and his family are possibly trying to make some money off the whole thing.
• Felt, Bernstein, and Woodward engaged in criminal behavior.
• Who should we really call heroic? Not Felt. Not Woodward and Bernstein. The real heroes are our men and women in uniform and the families that sacrifice so much for them.

I'm tired of people being called heroes when they aren't. Baseball players, unless they save someone's life, are not heroes. Winning a game with a homerun in the bottom of the 9th is not heroic. Frankly, teaching a kid how to read is not heroic. It is valuable and wonderful and worthy of praise, but it doesn't make the teacher a hero. Movie stars are basically never heroic. When they donate lots of money to some cause or give someone a car, they aren't being heroes. They are being generous. Neither turning traitor on your country nor breaking your sworn oath of office are heroic. Nor is reporting on classified material.

It isn't as though Woodward and Bernstein actually had to get the classified info. They just heard it from some guy and wrote it down. Every student who takes notes in class hears something and writes it down. Big deal. It takes more than that to make a hero, in my opinion.