the thing to take away from petraeus scandal - not that people are really capable of drawing conclusons like this, or they would have done it from infinite data around 2000 bc - is a vague recollection of what power actually is, and what sort of person actually wants it, and what people do with it when they get it. this is just a kind of hilarious thing: beyond hubris and tragedy into a realm of sheer narcissism, grotesque self-deception, and farce. so really, i want you to picture this situation; petraeus chooses broadwell as his biographer either because he's sleeping with her or because he wants to. then they spend months together working together on a hagiography of petraeus and screwing (if you believe this crap about how it only started later, you're a worse sucker than david's wife; it might be some sort of attempt to save the book, which ought to be vaporized except as a cautionary tale). let's say the wholly uncritical worship - whether it was sincere or not (and in this sort of hierarchy, sincerity and voluntariness are always pre-compromised) - had an erotic effect; petraeus finally realized how his sexuality was actually configured or what it was actually for: an orgy of the most mortifying self-love, gaucherie on a world-bestriding scale. petraeus is his own fetish. then broadwell's on her book tour with their stirring tribute to his extreme...excellence, giving him a blowjob on every news program and radio show, and then again at the hotel room that night. in brief, a pure ethic of public service.
normally i might have a certain sympathy with the 'human foibles'/hey that could happen to anyone/throw the first stone kind of approach. let's say you want to think that through before you apply it here. the person of petraeus exposed in the scandal is a conspicuously outstanding - a truly distinguished - nightmare.
i like privacy as much as the next guy, but i am not going to peg my argument for it on the example of an invasion of the privacy of the director of the cia, though like so many others i would die to protect it. i would love to hear him explicitly crying foul on that, though. i admit that the concept that someone is rummaging around in the email of the director of the cia is very surprising, unprecedented as far as i am recalling at all. indeed, it is potentially explosive; it seems to expose rival commanding factions in the security state, like you'd get in pakistan or iran: hard to say who's in charge of what, really. you start to wonder who controls the nukes. i wouldn't think we know the half of it between the fbi and the cia; it could well have to do with, like, rival adulterous sexual factions: rival procuresses and viagra suppliers, for example, rival studs and lovelies and distinguished old men peppered throughout the military, the secret service, defense contractors, lobbying firms, etc. well honestly what do you expect in that sort of authoritarian hierarchy? heroes?
