Sunday, November 11, 2012

Curious and curiouser

CIA Director Petraeus resigns in sex scandal

Powerful men cheat

Iran attacks US drone in international airspace

You know it isn’t good when things make you question the official narrative but it is getting to the point where certain administration narratives are getting a bit threadbare.

Ok, CIA Director David Patraeus (former Army star and four-star as well as Gen. Betray-us on some fronts) apparently had an affair with his biographer. At least he said he had an extramarital affair with someone. Is that supposed to shock us?

It doesn’t shock me much, but then I remember having a president who allegedly had a number of sexual dalliances but it didn’t drive him to resign. Got him impeached, but the Senate couldn’t go along and accept that those dalliances rose to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.

I don’t suspect that Gen. Patraeus’ dalliance rose to that level either, but I don’t know because I only know what I read in the news. Still, the abruptness of his resignation (according to the official timeline) either speaks very well of the man’s integrity (in that he would resign even before the information went public) or reeks of more nefarious motives, since he was scheduled to address a Congressional hearing next week on how the current administration seems to have bungled its efforts in Libya … as well as its response to the assault on (and subsequent death) of its ambassador to Libya while on a visit to its diplomatic facilities in Benghazi.

What actually strikes me almost humorous is the progressive reaction (on Huffington Post) that find something terribly wrong that “powerful” men seem to keep getting caught in sexual dalliances with women not their wives. Hello, it takes two to tango. I am sorry, but if the woman isn’t out there screaming it was rape, and in fact indicates that it was consensual, then I am not sure how the male half of the equation can be singled out for condemnation. In this case, it is pretty obvious – assuming that the “other party” that has been identified as being involved – that it indeed was consensual, then the trotting out of the “bad” men scenario seems a bit off base.

But I guess, given that Petraeus – in many other situations – appears to have been pretty much a straight shooter (unfortunately with the usual set of human failings and frailties), it helps to do what you can to cast whatever shadows on him when he is probably going to end up in front of a hostile House committee being interrogated under oath. Who knows what he might say that deviates from the official line put out by the administration. Now, at least, administration defenders can point to his obviously moral shortcomings and say that anything he says from now on can be discounted.

But, as I said, things are just a bit curious with the timing not only of this resignation, but the announcement the day after election was over that the week before the Iranians were busily shooting at a U.S. reconnaissance drone monitoring the approaches to the ports in Iraq and Kuwait. Of course, nothing nefarious there … the administration didn’t want to make it a political issue … which of course it would of and probably should have been … but that is something we know our current presidential administration would never do.

You couple that with the relief of the commander of a task group in the Arabian Sea, the fiasco at Benghazi, and you start to wonder: What the heck is going on here?

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