Dangerous Liasons: Sex and the Powerful Man

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few days, you have by now heard about CIA Director General Patraeus and his mistress, Paula Broadwell.


But for those of you who have made their abode in a subterrean cave, here is the rundown in broad strokes.  General Patraeus was the man who was put in charge of the surge in Afghanistan and until very recently was the Director of the CIA.  Well liked by members of both parties, he was supposedly on the short list that Romney was considering for vice presidential picks.  Patraeus met Broadwell in 2006 when he was still a member of the armed forces.  Broadwell was working on a biography of the general, and was given unusual access to the general. Their relationship was seen as cozy, going out for morning runs together, and she was given special rooms not normally reserved for members of the press.

With a fine pair of crazy eyes...

Broadwell went a just a wee bit crazy sometime in May of this year.  She began sending vaguely threatening emails to a woman named Jill Kelley, a family friend of Patraeus, whom Broadwell saw as a romantic rival.  Kelley became worried over the contents of the email, and gave them to a another friend, who was a member of the FBI.  The FBI managed to trace the emails to Broadwell, and other emails implicated Patreus in an affair.  (ETA: compromising emails between Kelley and another general have now become the focus of a separate investigation.)  When confronted by the FBI, both Patraeus and Broadwell admitted to the affair.  Both stated the affair started after Patraeus left the army, thus leaving him immune to military criminal charges.  FBI agents also seized low-level secret documents from Broadwell's computer, though once again, both she and Patreus deny that the documents came from Patraeus.

So other than salacious details, why do we care? 

Republicans keep trying to spin gold from straw on the Benghazi incident.  Obviously bad things happened, but what and why?  Was it an intelligence failure?  Deliberate negligence on the part of the State Department?  Or was it that Obama just didn't care enough in the aftermath?  There has been no coherent narrative on this.  The broader public hasn't shown a lot of interest on this subject, but the interjection of a sex scandal helps keep people more interested than they otherwise would be.

"It wasn't the crime, it was the cover-up."  Some people are trying to spin it as the White House covering up the sex scandal until after the election was over.  However, they are having some difficulty with this narrative, as Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor knew of the investigation sometime in October, and also did not publicly reveal that information, allowing the investigation to continue without undue politicization.

Powerful man caught by his own penis...again.  The press can never get enough of these stories, though the situation is timeless.  Just in the recent past we have Anthon Weiner texting photographs of his weiner, Eliot Spitzer with a prostitute,  former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford "walking the Appalachian Trail", David Vitter and his diaper fetish, and "the Big Dog" himself, Bill Clinton, and his bimbo eruptions.  What does this say about the judgment of the people that we elect?  Or does everyone do this, and no one talks about it?  If so, why do we continue to make such a huge fuss over these extramarital liasons?  Should Patraeus have been forced to resign?