The passing of Gerald Ford and all the talk about what a nice guy he was, a man definitely not Richard Nixon, reminds me of those turbulent Watergate days.

It’s one more bookend to a blessedly bygone era. Just a couple years ago we finally learned the identity of Deep Throat, an anonymous and pivotal source for much of the Washington Post’s reporting on the gradually unfolding Watergate scandal. Made famous by the Woodward and Bernstein book All the President’s Men and then by Hal Holbrook’s paranoid and angry performance in the movie of the same title.

Here’s a little-known fact about the high-level CIA man, Mark Felt, who turned out to be Deep Throat. On page 23 of Bob Woodward’s book about Felt, The Secret Man , we learn that his first job out of law school in the early 1940s was with the Federal Trade Commission. His first assignment? To determine whether “toilet paper with the Red Cross brand name had an unfair competitive advantage because people thought it was endorsed or approved by the American Red Cross. People were resistant to questions about their toilet paper usage, he discovered, and he couldn’t solve the case.”

Couldn’t solve the case, eh? Ah, Watergate: easier to decipher than how to regulate toilet tissue! This is just one of umptillion examples of how silly some of our basic regulations are.

And it wouldn’t have helped had toilet-paper users been forced to testify before Congress!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.