Foreign Policy has a great piece in which it advises that -- please! -- we should ignore the conspiracy theories coming from people who can't spell Petraeus. Which David Petraeus knows about in spades.
(Petraeus once explained that people started calling him "Peaches" because his last name was too difficult to pronounce during Little League games). ...FP
Among the nasties: Paula Broadwell is actually Petraus' (sic) daughter. And this common rightwing yada:
Petraeous affair was known for many months. Obama forced it out now to distract from all his other shady deals. Sandy, Benghazi, gun running.
Of course, being a spymaster is like getting an extra dose of testerone. Power, sex.
According to veteran intelligence reporter Ron Kessler, who has a well-drilled pipeline into the FBI, the resignation of Petraeus "followed an FBI investigation of many months" prompted by the interception of an email he sent to the "girlfriend."
Nothing remotely like that has touched the 19 CIA directors who preceded Petraeus.
The late William Colby, who headed the agency briefly during the tumultuous post-Watergate congressional investigations into assassinations in the mid-1970s, abruptly divorced his wife of 30 years and took up with a younger woman, but that was long after he resigned.
Which is not to say other senior CIA officials haven't been entangled in messy affairs and indiscretions, and easily survived.
A chief of the CIA's operations wing after 9/11 was caught on a security camera in an agency garage getting oral sex from a female subordinate, according to a widely circulated story. It didn't dent his reputation, perhaps because he was poorly regarded anyway, three agency sources said, and already on the way out.
Likewise, one of the CIA's chiefs of station in Baghdad after the 2003 invasion was "notorious for sleeping with subordinates," as one senior ex-agency official put it, in an account echoed by several other sources over the years. "He was put in the penalty box a couple of times," the source said, "but it was never never anything fatal," despite the written complaints of at least one woman serving there. He went on to to other higher-ranking agency jobs. ...FP
And it continues...
Wait a minute. Why is Petraeus not being allowed a pass this time --now, at this moment? Because -- I'm serious about this -- Republicans of this generation have the intellectual or emotional intelligence of below-average wankers. They want this latest pop-gun to play with, or maybe anything that might Obama down.
Not to mention the media: now that the election is over, the media need something new to keep people buying.
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