Deep Throat Caused the Cambodian Genocide ...

or so says Peggy Noonan:

What Mr. Felt helped produce was a weakened president who was a serious president at a serious time. Nixon's ruin led to a cascade of catastrophic events--the crude and humiliating abandonment of Vietnam and the Vietnamese, the rise of a monster named Pol Pot, and millions--millions--killed in his genocide.

Nixon's ruin led to the genocide in Cambodia? Um, wtf? It's one thing for conservatives to not consider Felt a hero, since he did bring down a conservative president. But it's another thing entirely to invent a sequence of events whereby Deep Throat is the cause of Pol Pot's genocide. That's absurd, slanderous, and way out of bounds for polite discourse.

But more importantly, it's totally incorrect. Several points:

1) It was the American Army's incursions into Cambodia while Nixon was President that destablized the country and started the sequence of events that led to the Khmer Rouge's takeover.

2) Pol Pot carried out his genocide while Nixon's appointed successor - Ford - and right-hand man - Kissinger - were still in power. These men did nothing to stop the genocide.

3) The North Vietnamese who Nixon was fighting actually did intervene in Cambodia, and ended the genocide by toppling the Khmer Rouge.

and most importantly 4) Nixon's downfall can be blamed entirely on one man - Richard Nixon. His resignation resulted not from some scandal cooked-up by liberals bent on his destruction but from his own criminality.

Ms. Noonan's retelling of history where Nixon would have somehow defeated the Viet Cong and strangled the infant Khmer Rouge in the cradle is pure fiction. But hagiographic fantasy appears to be her specialty.