If giving a concession speech is the hardest thing a public figure has to do, surely getting caught in a sex scandal and being forced to resign is the second hardest. As is always the case with these things, details about what forced CIA Director Petraeus to quit are trickling out and as always, there's plenty of embarrassment, bad judgement and stupidity to go around.
It didn't take long for the identity of the "other woman" to surface. No surprise, she's a lot younger and, yes, a lot prettier than the General's wife of 38 years. One of the things that always intrigued me about the Charles/Diana/Camilla dynamic was that Charles continued to be obsessed with Camilla, who was older, chubbier and dowdier than his younger, thinner, stylishly fashionable wife. None of that here. Compared to the glamorous
Paula Broadwell, who's 20 years younger than the General, poor Mrs. Pretraeus looks old and tired.
Apparently yesterday was Broadwell's 40th birthday; she's married to a doctor and has two kids. Did she know that her secret was about to go public in a very big way? She recently wrote a hagiographic biography of General Petraeus and did a book tour to promote it. Videos of interviews from the tour are now going viral, and watching them now, it certainly looks like her relationship with her subject may have been more than strictly professional.
The
Washington Post says that rumors of infidelity have followed General Petraeus for years. Really? As I think about it, it seems strange that this didn't surface when he was under consideration to be CIA Director. On the other hand, "Pulitzer Prize-winning WaPo Pentagon correspondent" Thomas Ricks was on CNN yesterday talking about the scandal and when Wolf Blitzer asked if he was surprised by all this he replied, "Not at all. In the CIA, if you haven't had an affair you're not a player." Wow. Who knew?
Finally, there's
this. Someone wrote into the New York Times' Ethicist column in July, saying that his wife was having an affair with a "government executive." With what we now know, it sounds like the letter could have been written by Mrs. Broadwell's husband. Was he trying to "out" his wife and her lover?
