Contributors

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Petraeus Falls off the Pedestal

The most amazing thing about the whole Petraeus affair, now spilling over to Gen. John Allen, is how utterly unamazing it is.

These men, at the pinnacle of power in the military and the intelligence community, turn out to be regular schmoes just like the rest of us. The story is sounding more and more like a bunch of teenage kids having a war on Facebook.

It goes like this: Petraeus starts an affair with Paula Broadwell, using Dropbox to get around the email trail. Allan starts an affair with Jill Kelley, exchanging thousands of emails. Broadwell sees that Kelley is also emailing Petraeus daily and sends Kelley threatening emails. Kelley complains to an FBI friend about the emails. Mr. FBI becomes obsessed the case and with Kelley, and sends her shirtless photos of himself.

What is it about using the Internet that makes everyone's IQ drop 100 points? How can people using government computers and who are constantly surrounded by aides and guards and secret service protection details possibly think they can keep these affairs secret?

You'd think we'd learn to expect this sort of thing after Tiger Woods, Anthony Weiner, Chris Lee, John Edwards, John Ensign, Newt Gingrich (two or three times), Bill Clinton, Larry "Wide Stance" Craig, David Vitter, Ted Haggard, Mark Sanford, Mark Foley and half the Republican House leadership during the Clinton impeachment debacle, and on and on and on and on.

And that's just in the last several years. The history books are full of sordid stories of presidents, prime ministers, princes, priests, popes and prophets undone by their inability to keep their penises in their pants.

Looking on the bright side, at least Petraeus and Allen weren't having affairs with subordinates.

The takeaway, for the nth time, is that it is a colossal mistake to put men like Petraeus on a pedestal. Yeah, he's a smart guy. But he's just a guy, like anyone else.

Nobody—nobody—is worthy of the adulation that we're so eager to heap upon them. Not Petraeus, not the pope, not the president, not Mohammed. Their work can and should be praised on its merits, but their persons deserve no worship. They're all just human beings, every bit as flawed as the rest of us.

Regular schmoes have affairs too, but no one is watching them. They have little to lose and will only disappoint their families and friends if they get caught. 

So the question is, why do these important men keep doing this? Does our elevating them to godhood make them lose perspective, buy into the hype and think they can do no wrong? Or do they consider themselves regular schmoes just doing a job, unworthy of the attention lavished upon them and therefore under no particular compulsion to lead an exemplary life?

I don't know. Maybe it's having their brains pickled in testosterone for fifty years...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Does our elevating them to godhood...?"

Speak for yourself, fucktard. Only dumbass racist fucksticks like you and your liberal ilk elevate any man to godhood. It's part of your genetic makeup to think that you need someone better, smarter, etc, to make your decisions for you and the rest of the country.

Obviously, the proletariat cannot be trusted to make their own choices. At least in your version of the USSA.

juris imprudent said...

Indeed, just who is doing all of the "elevating"? Those who believe that govt is the solution to every problem - real or imagined; that those in govt employment are somehow special (in order to make those decisions we are all too fucking stupid to make on our own).

Now dumbshit - ask yourself where was the institutional failure that allowed some dumbshit broad's insecurity over coming out on the short end of a cat fight to become the grounds for a 4th Amdt free-for-all? WTF was the FBI doing in investigating this in the first place; and once Broadwell was identified as the perp did the investigation continue into who she was fucking (other than her husband)? I have a feeling that if it was a Republican Admin you'd be screaming about witch-hunts and civil rights violations.