GEEKS AND THE SCOUNDREL

Mark Felt secured the book and movie deal he was seeking this week, with contracts stipulating that "Deep Throat" must be portrayed in the film by Will Smith.

Felt recently crawled out of the La Brea Tar Pits to admit he was Deep Throat, the mysterious high-level official who lurked in darkened parking garages to offer anonymous tips to geeky Washington Post reporters.

Based on Deep Throat's tips, the geeky reporters detailed the smarmy activities of the president we were stuck with at the time, Richard Nixon, and the president's involvement in a burglary at the Watergate building.

The result is that Richard Nixon was exposed as a scoundrel to millions of Americans who were too dumb to figure it out for themselves.

Young people probably don't recognize the significance of this, but they should remain alert to the sobering knowledge that they live in a world filled with old people who once voted for Richard Nixon.

Your parents may have voted for Nixon. Your grandparents probably voted for Nixon. The mild-mannered author of this very column might have voted for Nixon. Nixon voters still roam the earth. And if today's youth are unable to recognize this sobering reality as legitimate reason to question authority, today's youth must be brain dead.

Decades later, America still suffers from Watergate's unintended consequences, the worst of which are the endless appearances of Bob Woodward on Larry King Live.

Nevertheless, we have Mark Felt and geeky reporters to thank for driving Nixon out of office.

Felt is now being hailed as a hero, but he was not completely innocent. He was second-in-command at the FBI during the Era of Nixon, but it would be rude to say he was "under" J. Edgar Hoover. Prior to outing himself as Deep Throat, Felt's only claim to fame was avoiding prison for illegally bugging innocent Americans.

Deep Throat was shrouded in mystery for decades after Watergate because Woodward promised he would never divulge Felt's identify until Felt had moved on to the Darkened Parking Garage in the Sky.

Now in the twilight of his life, with one foot in the grave and another on a banana peel, Felt stepped forward to seize upon the gravy train that comes with modern tales of political intrigue: lucrative book contracts, film deals and perhaps even an appearance on Larry King Live.

News reports indicate that Felt will receive about $1 million for a book he has tentatively titled "I Am Not Linda Lovelace."

Portions of the Mark Felt book have already been leaked to the Joe Livernois Column. We received the documents in a darkened back alley from a fellow wearing a fedora and a trench coat who insisted his name was "Hal Holbrook."

The following are a few startling revelations from "I Am Not Linda Lovelace":

• "J. Edgar Hoover may have had his problems, but he looked terrific in pink chiffon."

• "Working for the FBI was lots of fun, especially when they let me fool around with surreptitious recording devices. The only downer? I could never get my shoe phone to work."

• "I was never much of a Richard Nixon fan, but I really started to have serious doubts about him when I caught him playing 'Ring Around the Rosy' with J. Edgar in the Oval Office."

• "I spent decades in the FBI and encountered plenty of strange fellows, but I never met anyone creepier than G. Gordon Liddy."

• "I've never even met Linda Lovelace."