Finally, a twist to the Petraeus story that ties into my professional interests.
When I first heard about how Petraeus’s affair with his biographer got outed, it sounded surprisingly stupid for such an apparently intelligent man. I don’t mean the “how could he be so stupid as to have an affair” part; I’ve long been used to the fact that powerful men can have affairs that bring them down without being especially dumb. I mean the part where it sounded as if Broadwell had actually broken into Petraeus’ email to send threatening messages to another woman. What possessed the head of the CIA to give his mistress, and such a jealous mistress, access to his email? Or to be so careless about his email security that she could break in?
It turns out that she didn’t crack his email, and that Petraeus was more cautious than I had thought.
They learned that Ms. Broadwell and Mr. Petraeus had set up private Gmail accounts to use for their communications, which included explicit details of a sexual nature, according to U.S. officials. But because Mr. Petraeus used a pseudonym, agents doing the monitoring didn’t immediately uncover that he was the one communicating with Ms. Broadwell.
Although both Broadwell’s reportedly threatening emails to the other woman and Petraeus’ and Broadwell’s communication with each other were pseudonymous, the FBI determined who was who. First, the used Gmail’s location data to determine that the threatening emails had been sent from hotels where Broadwell was staying, and got a warrant to monitor her (not Petraeus’) email. Then eventually (this part isn’t described) they figured out that the pseudonym who had exchanged all those steamy emails with Broadwell was Petraeus.
So, your Internet pseudonyms are probably not secure if they ever come to the attention of the FBI.
Remember when the student from my alma mater, the University of Tennessee, hacked Sarah Palin’s email account? Not all that hard, apparently. I don’t have any interest in hacking. But, I don’t have any misconception that my identity is truly anonymous. Steve2 called me by my first name one day. He must have a great interest in who I am.
Figleaf is an excellent description. It hides your identity at first glance, but not upon closer investigation.
Glad to hear Petraeus didn’t hand out his email passwords. I really couldn’t care less who he banged on the side.
he banged on the side
Or any other postion.
@DADvocate: I wasn’t at all surprised when Sarah Palin’s email was hacked. Most people don’t choose all that good passwords, password cracking programs are fairly smart, and Sarah Palin isn’t someone I’d expect to be any better than average at computer security. I do expect better of Petraeus (after all, if he’s head of the CIA, following best password security practices should be a job requirement). Not that that means I’d expect it to be impossible for him to be hacked; after all, RSA got hacked. But he ought to be able to keep his email secure from someone who neither has a STEM degree nor any particular special computer knowledge that we know of. But, yeah, in general, getting into people’s email accounts isn’t all that hard.
@Mustang Sally: I got the “figleaf” analogy from a net friend who uses it as his pseudonym (http://www.realadultsex.com).
Seriously, I don’t get this outrage over infidelity at all.
My impression is that “males and females are pretty much equally non-monogamous.” I believe all recent polls seem to bare that out (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1211104/Think-men-unfaithful-sex-A-study-shows-WOMEN-biggest-cheats–theyre-just-better-lying-it.html and , and this would be one time I tend to agree with the “conventional wisdom.” It’s so rare when the “conventional wisdom” is either wise or right.
This affair was obviously completely consensual. It’s not like an executive and a secretary or a high ranking public official and an intern. . .BUT, it turns out that even most of those seem (on closer scrutiny) to be consensual. Am I really one of the few Americans who see Silvio Berlusconi as a hero?!
To those who cluck their teeth and piously intone what a “pathetic laughingstock he is,” I have to answer, “YOU try keeping up that torrid pace at 76! Even if (hell, ESPECIALLY IF) he’s on HGH, I say, “Molto Bene!
I’d honestly thought we’d turned a corner after the Clinton/Lewinsky affair. I remember remarking that groups like NOW etc could, “never again hound a hard-working executive merely for playing hard on the side…even with someone in a subordinate position.”
Now THIS! It’s all very disheartening, to say the least.
I never could get my head around the idea of “women as sexual victims in most sexual exchanges” – the Andrea Dworkin view. I don’t see women like that. I see all human as ready and often willing predators and mostly sexually impulsive. Sexually Americans appear like the fatty who pigs out then feels guilty about overeating. Here people routinely engage in wanton, reckless sex, then feel really guilty about it all. I never got that “guilt trait.” I’ve done a LOT of awful, often messy things (sexual pecker-dillos would be waaaay down that list) and, I’ve never felt guilty…or even “bad” about any of them. After all, they’re DONE. What’s the use of feeling bad about them now?
I guess I kind of get the “age of consent thing,” BUT I do note that many, MANY cultures don’t have any such strictures at all…..just a cross-cultural observation. STILL, in our society today, just the designation of “victim” is enough to stigmatize an individual.
Personally, I don’t buy the idea that Petraeus was/is looking to avoid testifying on Benghazi. The House WILL without question subpoena him and its EXTREMELY unlikely that the Democratic Senate will want to appear to “play politics with this issue” by NOT, for instance getting the answers to;
1) Why were we surreptitiously sending arms to Syrian rebels through Turkey and Lebanon, while telling Russia (who made clear they saw such actions as “destabilizing to the region and a threat to their national security”) that we were doing no such thing?
2) How was the fact that Benghazi was a CIA compound and NOT an :”Embassy” in any conventional way such a poorly kept secret?
3) IF, as claimed, State Dept officials feared that Russian advisers were behind the military operation assault on Benghazi, why did such a triviality give them such pause? “In for a penny, in for a pound.” When a clandestine mission like that is “found out,” the only proper response is a swift military interdiction – BOTH sides usually want to avoid “widening the conflict,” so both usually take the opportunity to feign surprise that “rogue elements” in each of their communities did such things. In other words, there was probably a very little chance that the Russians would’ve expanded this conflict in response to our own military response to that Benghazi assault…soooo, why didn’t anyone here have the (apparent) guts to just “roll the dice” on that one?
All of this is out in the open now (http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/49761), so why bother protecting or politicizing this? There’s far too much risk in politicizing this…at least from the defensive standpoint.
The people want someone blamed and punished for this debacle….could be Hillary….BUT it could never have been Petraeus because he never had the authority to act alone. Someone else made the final decision.
Now, it appears that it’s just a matter of getting him to “fess up.” After all, he no longer has any position to lose!
You and Mustang Sally would probably like the Onion’s take on this:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/widening-petraeus-scandal-reveals-human-race-has-b,30368/
and
http://www.theonion.com/articles/nation-horrified-to-learn-about-war-in-afghanistan,30367/
I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, given that marriage involves making public vows in return for lots of benefits to help you keep them “in sickness and in health” (in terms of ability to move for each other, take time off for each other’s illness, insure each other, etc.), “those who cluck their teeth and piously intone what a “pathetic laughingstock he is,”” don’t seem to me to be extracting too high a price for breaking those vows. (Besides, as far as Paula Broadwell’s concerned, if you write a glowing biography called “All In” without mentioning that you’re sleeping with the subject, you have to expect that someone will later photoshop your title to “All Up In My Snatch.”) On the other hand, so many people do cheat on their spouses that it really doesn’t seem practical to me to staff the whole CIA (or the whole Congress, or any other large institution) only with people who are faithful to their spouses.
And, at this point, if I’m going to be outraged at any of them, I’m more inclined to be angry about Jill Kelley’s phony cancer charity than any of the sexual indiscretions.
The ridicule and scorn aren’t the issues for me at all….the impeachment of an executive )President or CEO of a company) goes way too far.
I once naively believed that personal judgment reflected on one’s overall judgment BUT that is simply not always the case. Many great investors and financiers are extraordinary money-makers while exercising wildly erratic personal judgment.
In Clinton’s case, he was successfully moving that Party to the Center-Right and was politically assassinated for that.
Call me old fashioned, but I much prefer the way the Italians enjoy, with bewildered bemusement the dalliances of Silvio Berlusconi.
In this case, Petraeus being forced to resign seems prudish AND lends credence to the worst possible conspiracy theories. THANKFULLY he (or someone close to him) let Paula Broadwell deliver “the goods” (“the USA smuggling weaponry to anti-Assad rebels via Turkey & Lebanon in the face of legitimate Russian concerns,” AND “the Embassy wasn’t so much an “Embassy” but a CIA compound”…with the added the wrinkle that “a number of al Qaeda fighters may have been taken prisoner there”….with the notation that that last point “has yet to be vetted.”)…very funny stuff! They let a civilian with no security clearance deliver a veritable CIA briefing.
Petraeus has got to take care of himself now and that will almost certainly mean hurling someone else of higher status under that proverbial bus.
I totally agree that personal judgment and professional judgment don’t track all that well (Clinton’s definitely a case in point). And I don’t think Clinton should have been impeached, or that Petraeus should need to resign. If it were up to me, they’d all get the same treatment David Letterman got when he confessed to the affair that guy threatened to blackmail him over: people mocked him and shook their heads to their hearts’ content, but no one ever supposed his job was in jeopardy.
“If it were up to me, they’d all get the same treatment David Letterman got when he confessed to the affair that guy threatened to blackmail him over…” (LGS)
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I’d agree, but, of course that’s not what we see happening today. You’d swear we’re all Puritans or something, as opposed to the porn-addicted low-lives most of us seem to be.
A part of it (in my view) is that we tend to idealize people in certain positions. Karen Street did it with “scientists.” I got to know a number of the RAND “brain trust” that was set to “remake New York City” under the Lindsay administration and as a 16 year old self-professed “punk,” saw the limits of their plans better than any of them seemed to. From that experience came my belief in what I’ve come to call “Expanding Variability” – the more data/knowledge we uncover, the more variables must be taken into account and ultimately its those unseen, unaccounted for variables that break down most such “planned systems.”
New York’s inglorious RAND experiment wound up delivering New York City into bankruptcy by 1975.
I guess I didn’t have all that much respect for such “experts” then, and I haven’t developed any more to this day…and maybe that set of LOWERED expectations due to not idealizing such people helps me to accept their inevitable frailties. They’re as human as any of us…some even more so.
A LOT of brilliant researchers, administrators and planners are completely rotten people.
I don’t know why that would surprise anyone, but apparently it still does. I think the late, great radio talker Jean Shepherd did a number of bits about that, one of his funniest being imagining Liz Taylor arguing with the phone company over her phone bill, or Charles DeGaulle wondering if he could get another day out of these socks, noting, “We just can’t imagine these people bogged down in the minutia that is every day life for the rest of us.”
Worse still is the idea that we’ve all gotten worse….that we’re all just a lot more rotten than our forebears ever were. We’re certainly more spoiled, less tough, less individualistic, but many of our ancestors were very bit as personally odious as we are. Ben Franklin was the Silvio Berlusconi of his day, carrying on affairs with married women well into his 70s!
An acquaintance of mine (now deceased) used to say, “If you find sex dirty, it’s probably because you’re awkward, or else maybe you’re just not doing it right.” He was an obnoxious prick, but there’s probably something to that observation.