Rejecting the description of Felt as a national hero, Buchanan said "there's nothing heroic about breaking faith with your people, breaking the law, sneaking around in garages, putting stuff from an investigation out to a Nixon-hating Washington Post."

What shook the nation's confidence in the government wasn't an FBI official who leaked information to a couple of newspaper reporters. It was Richard Nixon and his men giving the nod to all kinds of dirty tricks because they thought it was all right to do anything that served the purpose of getting him re-elected and keeping him there, even if it involved running roughshod over the Constitution.

But, to Colson and Buchanan, Felt was just a rat, another spineless, disloyal jerk like Sammy "The Bull" Gravano and Henry Hill, who sold out their bosses before disappearing into the witness-protection program.

Colson, known as Nixon's hatchet man because of the various break-ins and smears he instigated, got religion after Watergate, and Buchanan has become a commentator some people take seriously. But the culture of the White House that existed back then is still in them.

A code of silence, often confused with a code of honor, exists among cops and public figures, as well as among thieves and murderers. But it's bad if it hides corruption and crime, and fails to reveal the rottenness at the core of the organization.

That's what Colson and Buchanan seem to be celebrating - loyalty over ethics. Sadly, this sentiment also permeates the current administration. It exists among George W. Bush's most trusted advisers - Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice - who helped provide the rationale for a costly war that we didn't need. It's there in Karl Rove, a man notorious for his skill at dirty politics who is now the president's chief political adviser. And it's obvious in vengeful stunts like the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame because her husband didn't heed the party line on the weapons of mass destruction.

So far, it doesn't appear that George W. Bush has condoned any criminal behavior among his underlings. He is, as a colleague pointed out, an ideologue and a troglodyte, but not a criminal. But Colson and Buchanan's dismissals of Felt as a snitch and Bernstein and Woodward as mere "stenographers" show how dangerously some Republicans miss the point.

They don't appreciate how important the Watergate story was, or the courage it took for two young reporters to stare down an entire presidential administration, in the face of those who called them irresponsible and liars.

At a time when journalists who write anything against the administration are likely to be smeared as unpatriotic, we should appreciate all the more what W. Mark Felt did. Whatever his other motives may have been, he knew something immoral and illegal was going on in the Nixon White House, and he put the word out. I'm glad he's finally taking his bow.