| It started out not so weird. A rich white guy has an affair. OK, understood. It appears Petraeus did nothing wrong beyond that, which is bad for his marriage, but theoretically started after he was no longer living under the UCMJ, and therefore not subject to prosecution (including a jail term), and the FBI deemed that he hadn't given away any secrets. I understand that. Then, there was the paramour, who seems to have threatened a woman she saw as competition. Now that's bad form, but likely not cause for an FBI investigation. But the other, other, woman, Jill Kelley, had a friend at the FBI. Who sent her shirtless pictures of himself, and then was thrown off the case for becoming obsessed, and is now under investigation himself. Really. So obsessed, by the way, that he went to Eric Cantor and David Reichert because the FBI wasn't doing "enough". These two Congressmen didn't see fit to report anything to the Intelligence Committee. Huh. But it doesn't stop with David Petraeus, Paula Broadwell, Jill Kelley and the nameless FBI agent. Now it turns out that General John Allen and Jill Kelley exchanged between 20,000 and 30,000 pages of email in two years while he was supposedly running the war in Afghanistan. Again, really. 24,000 pages would be 2,000 pages a month over two years, or almost 70 pages a day. Now, I understand the story as something out of high school: John and Jane are going steady, but John is seeing Laura on the side. Laura is okay with this for some reason, but she thinks that John is also seeing Harriet, who is down the chain, and therefore more of a threat than Jane, so she confronts Laura in the girls room at lunch. Laura goes to her brother, who goes to his friends, who are both linebackers on the high school football team. Meanwhile, it turns out that Laura isn't seeing John, but is actually seeing Bruce, who really should be busy studying for the ACT and SAT because he's got a shot at Harvard. The adulterers are all adults and should know better. They are all military in one way or another, and "honour" is supposed to be somewhere in their code. The guys dealt with big deal military secrets, and REALLY should have known better. It appears that they're all Republicans, which makes a little more sense. But still, I find the whole thing amazing in its cupidity. (Yes, that's the appropriate word. I didn't mean stupidity, although that likely applies, too.) And then we have Reichert and Cantor. Reichert is an ex-FBI agent and would have known that the FBI doesn't release cases until after they're closed/decided. But Cantor? Petraeus was ostensibly a Republican, but serving the Democratic president as head of the CIA. He had every political reason to bring this out when he found out, or at the very least, bring it to the Intelligence Committee. He knew he was supposed to, but he balked. That's an interesting question, especially given the timing. Cantor supposedly was informed in mid-October, and this would have been a real October surprise, albeit one where everyone concurs that the White House was told nothing. In the end, I think we'll find out that Allen's emails didn't take to much from the Afghan effort, since there's never been a way to "win" that from the start. No one seems to have been dealing in secrets flowing to our enemies. Several divorce lawyers are going to make a ton of money, and there will be books. Overall, just a lot of bad lust decisions all the way around. |
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