I really don’t have much to say about the Petraeus resignation and scandal, except a few observations.
First, a hint to public officials everywhere: if she’d (or he’d) be out of your league if you were a civvy and both of you were in a bar, then leave it alone. Go home, jerk off and forget her. You’re sixty and not particularly good looking, how long did you think it would last? And you’re forty and a starry-eyed biographer. How long did YOU think it would last?
Next, Andy Borowitz had the best take on the “conspiracy” angle, by pointing out that Petraeus began the affair over a year ago, so clearly he intended to use it to distract from the Benghazi story. Petraeus can still be called as a witness in the House hearings and worse for the Obama administration, can’t hide behind executive privilege or national security any longer.
Third, it’s pretty sad that a man of such accomplishment and a woman of such accomplishment have created such a roadblock for themselves. I’m not going to point fingers: the second the tango began, both of them were to blame and who’s to say when the music started?
My real sympathy goes out to the spouses of the couple in question, of course, but I save my deepest symapthies for Jill Kelly, the woman who triggered this whole mess — not incorrectly — by complaining about threatening anonymous e-mails. She gets implicated in so many ways here and I expect this will have repercussions for an apparently (there’s one implication right there) uninvolved person. Think about it: she is suspected by folks of being the “other” other woman, her actions disgraced Petraeus (*ahem* No, but people will think that), her name gets dragged out through trials and investigations and she’ll now have to lawyer up for what? For being the recipient of some really nasty e-mails.
Finally, I wish we’d all grow up a little and learn that power begets sex. This is an unspoken deal that politicians and their families make going in, and if you think they do not, then they’re being naive and not paying attention. While the smart ones manage to stay away from it all, to ask anyone to betray their sex drive is like asking them to stop eating.
Doesn’t our FBI have enough to do, what with running around looking for nitwits to whom they can sell Play-Doh and who can then be dramatically charged in a fomented plot to “deploy weapons of mass destruction” hither and yon? Or find a guy who is shopping at too many hair salons and who can be charged with plotting to blow up the New York Subway system using hair spray?
Now when a woman comes to them with emails where a jealous woman is telling her to “stay away from my man,” they launch a massive investigation which uncovers, amazingly enough, adultery?
I do believe our FBI may be a bit overstaffed.
Yes. I mean imagine how this whole thing should have played out.
First the power players as you say know going in that power attracts sexually and that all this has to be sorted out ahead of time. Both partners would get it that sex is well down on the list of what makes their relationship tick.
Second the political system and the media system would not care about personal stuff. Kinda like France.
So then when someone gets threatening emails the FBI does the grown-up thing and tells the principals to knock it off.
End of story.
It’s a wonderful narrative, but it doesn’t have much in common with real world security in intelligence organizations.
Firstly, any FBI National Security guy worth anything would love to blade CIA, good for the resume, good for promotion – hell, if you’re a G-man, you probably think it’s good for your eternal soul.
Secondly, when someone does something thought out of character like this, the reflexive should always be whether they’ve started acting out of character in other ways as well, and what the implications might be for information security.
We’re working through the trial of the biggest traitor we’ve had in decades up here, pretty significant amount of damage done. Guy went over as a walk-in. Motivation: his wife cheated on him. Does selling out branch to get back at your wife in some bizarre way make sense? No. But concealed sex stuff matters and it always gets poked at.
Yeah, well the secrets business is by definition a dysfunctional one.
So, right, my prescription is pretty ludicrous.
Sweeping statements are, by definition, so broad as to be a poor basis for prescription.
@JustPlainDave (Can’t reply anymore so have to resort to alternate blog reply mechanism)
When I stated for the record to my doctor that I was getting swept up in this Petraeus stuff, she broadly prescribed a relaxing outing to a baseball game.
But I replied to her that “Sweeping statements are, by definition, so broad as to be a poor basis for prescription.”
I agree with your assessment. Power can be an aphrodisiac, but propinquity can also lead to love affairs. How many years in his marriage has Petraeus been stationed abroad? As a four star general, it wouldn’t take much to add an attractive woman to his entourage as a traveling biographer. Next thing you know, two people can’t resist entering into a sexual relationship, even if they know it is not “meaningful” or intended to last a long time, and even if it clearly jeopardizes their careers and his public image if anyone discovered the truth.
I don’t know if we have enough information about Jill Kelly or the threatening emails to make any judgments about what happened. Delving further into a personal mess like this is unsavory if there are no identifiable breaches of national security; it’s the sort of thing only a Republican with a fetish for stained blue dresses would enjoy. If it looks like this is just a personal tragedy affecting four married people, and if Petraeus has already paid a high personal price by resigning, can’t we the public drop the whole thing?
Must read from Michael Hastings on the profound, substantive, gaping flaws in Petraeus’ record ignored by a swooning media.
I’d like the three minutes required to read that back please. Seriously, that was terrible.
Yes … to ask anyone to betray their sex drive is like asking them to stop eating.
Now you understand how cruel it is to brand girls and women as sluts for merely enjoying their sex drive which is, as you suggest, the same as telling them to stop eating.
As with obesity and noting someone is fat, where is the line before someone can be called a slut?
Over the course of my life, I’ve slept with dozens…I’m being modest here…of women. I am a slut, and acknowledge it, but then I was also faithfully married for close to twenty years and in committed relationships for another ten or so.
So…slut? No? Does the same logic hold for Broadwell if a cursory examination of her past (which I would oppose)…reveals she a repeat offender? And what about Bill Clinton? Slut or no?
In a post about Petraeus, a married man, you make the following statement: To ask anyone to betray their sex drive is like asking them to stop eating, then you insinuate that because Broadfoot, his lover, is married she is a slut.
You throw in the totally unrelated topic of obesity, resurrect Bill Clinton, and brag about your own sexual prowess to prove exactly what?
It is disingenuous, to say the least. You know damn well that the word slut is used by our society to refer exclusively to so-called “immoral” women. Even all the dictionaries say so.
12 Year-old girls are called sluts. I myself have been called a slut at age 21 for innocently flirting, while unmarried, with a couple of boys on a beach.
The smell of hypocrisy in your comment is overwhelming.
What does it feel like, Actor, to be an oppressor?
I would like to take the last sentence back as I just read your latest post. My apologies.
Joshua Foust nails it, for me. I suspect JPD’s mileage will vary significantly.
Not at all. I don’t have any problem with Josh’s piece – it actually bears some resemblance to actual on the ground reality. Hastings’ piece was frankly a blender full of sensationalist, outrage as entertainment, please buy my book, low thought, zero insight, crap. It sounds good to those who don’t know how complicated the reality of it was.
Over-simplification is frankly just another indicator that it’s infotainment not news. Just like the implicit notion being sold in much of the critique – if only it weren’t Petraeus, apparently it would be all better. Hooey – it only it were that simple.
That Foust can read the winds and ride them. He’s a truly skilled apparatchik. Two days ago he was publicly talking about the sad end to the career of a “storied general” and now he’s all, “Yeah, I never thought he was all that great.”
I seriously don’t see what so many liberal bloggers see in the guy. Sure, he does a pretty good job of presenting standard imperial schlock in a kinder, gentler, more intellectual manner. I guess that’s good enough. Both he and his support in the liberal blogging community speak volumes to what’s wrong with and passes for foreign policy thinking among liberals in general. Yes to empire just so long as we can make its policies sound like they’re being implemented for the good of the planet. Yes to fawning over the military, but with careful criticism that’s not too critical. Etc.
It’s becoming a handy barometer for me: the higher a writer values Foust’s opinion, the more quickly i can discount the writer’s opinion.
oh come on, whom would “we” really approve to head our “premier intelligence agency”?
I thought Broadwell sounded familiar. Blech.
There are many angles to this story. The one you bring up is related to the fact that the attraction many women feel toward powerful men is socially constructed.
Personal involvement with a dominant master is like an elixir for the subservient class.
It can temporarily blind them to their otherwise genuine feelings of empathy toward the disadvantaged.
Here‘s a feminist angle.
I’m with you adrena. Broadwell will be the one who pays for this in terms of career and legacy. And look how the military-intelligence sycophants are already framing it. She’s just a hanger-on slut who writes glowingly of flattening villages. I never liked that bitch anyhow.
Now watch the liberal commentariat ride that wave. There won’t be serious questioning of Petraeus’s theories that didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of being implemented by the modern US military, or his actual record in Iraq or Afghanistan, or his potential offenses. There will be a backing off from the media myth of Petraeus until such time as Broadwell gets the lion’s share of the negative press, and then Dave will get rehabilitated for his fantastic theories and turning outright catastrophe in Iraq to mere defeat characterized by vicious, sectarian civil war.
Actually, the MI folks I’ve observed (at least on Twitter) are using the controversy as a platform to launch the latest missive in the ongoing COIN vs. CT wonk war. Foust has beef going back nearly two years with Broadwell over her glib delight in response to Petraeus’ apparent collective punishment policies in Afghanistan. Overall, CT partisans (like Foust) smell serious blood in the COIN camp and are going after Petraeus (and the many obsequious partisans in the national press and foreign policy establishment who enabled his ascent in exchange for access and/or influence).
John Reed:
(h/t TAFNA Praktite)
Scott Lemieux:
Stranger in a strange land….
Shirtless FBI agent: Photo was joke mailed to friends, reporter