Relapse wrote:
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/09/15054517-cia-director-david-petraeus-resigns-cites-extramarital-affair?lite

I read down a bit in the comments on this story and chuckled at the one stating Clinton having a go at Lewinski lowered the bar for politicians all the way to the ground, so Petreaus shouldn't have to resign.

Petraeus’s resignation letter says, “After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair.” But Petraeus has actually been married for more than 38 years; the wedding was on July 6, 1974. In other words, if you read the resignation letter carefully, he’s telling you that this happened sometime between July 2011 and July 2012, not recently. Why didn’t he resign sooner? Or, on the flip side, why didn’t he try to hang on longer if he’d held on this long already?

 whembly wrote:
The timing seems... weird...

I wonder if this is an attempt to discredit Patreaus before he testifies in Congress regarding Bengahzi?]

 Ouze wrote:

 whembly wrote:
The timing seems... weird...

I wonder if this is an attempt to discredit Patreaus before he testifies in Congress regarding Bengahzi?]

Someday, all the conspiracy theorists of the world will come together, and build a statue of you.

 d-usa wrote:
My cat took a crap today, I thought the timing was weird considering Obama and all...

Seriously, get the tinfoil of your head...

 Ouze wrote:
Congress can compel nearly whoever the hell they want to testify, really. The list of people they cannot compel to at least appear is tiny; generally people covered by executive privilege and so on.

 whembly wrote:
The timing seems... weird...

 AustonT wrote:

 whembly wrote:
The timing seems... weird...

If you had followed this with virtually anything but Benghazi it would have made sense. The first thing I thought when I heard it is "escape hatch." He probably doesn't particularly like the politicians he has to work with. Which is what I assume is at least party true because Dianne Finestien LOVES her some Davie.

Ever since the September 11 attack on our consulate and CIA station in Benghazi, “the dog in the night-time” of the scandal the media did its best to bury during the election campaign has been David Petraeus, the Iraq War commander turned spook-in-almost-chief. Throughout the orgy of misinformation, disinformation, finger-pointing, blame-shifting and general confusion, Petraeus remained adamantly silent, a hostage to fortune somewhere within the bowels of the CIA building in Langley. The one man who could have cut through the administration’s fog machine said nothing substantive as ambassador Chris Stevens and three others were laid to rest.


And now, just a couple of days after the election that returned Barack Hussein Obama II to executive power in Washington, he’s gone — resigned in the wake of an affair that likely occurred more than a year ago, apparently with his biographer, Paula Broadwell — who herself is under FBI investigation, reportedly for trying to access the general’s classified emails. Further, Petraeus will now not testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee about Benghazi next week.

And that, if Congress acquiesces and does not immediately subpoena Petraeus and either compel him to testify or force the administration to again assert executive privilege (as it did with Attorney General Eric Holder in the Fast and Furious mess), will be that — we’ll never know, and Obama will do his best to completely bury, what happened in Benghazi.

More details no doubt will dribble out over the coming days and weeks, but here’s what we can reasonably surmise. Although the official story is that the affair was uncovered by the FBI’s investigation into the emails, nevertheless it appears from the wording of Petraeus’s resignation letter that the affair began some time after July 2011; he became CIA director fourteen months ago. Therefore — unless he concealed that information from his vetters, which is highly unlikely given everything we know about the man — the Obama administration had to have known about the relationship from the start. Which means that, in effect, Petraeus confessed to his own “honey trap” and handed Valerie Jarrett, the Javert of Obama’s White House, a termination card, effective whenever she and the president cared to play it. And play it they did, right after the election and just before his testimony on the Hill. Well played, indeed.

Whereas if the affair began before Petraeus was being considered for the CIA post, and he didn’t reveal it, his reputation will never recover.

So now we can begin to understand the silence emanating from the Langley Home for Lost Boys over the past several months. Right from the start, the Agency was fingered by the White House and by Hillary Clinton’s State Department as the fall guy for the Benghazi fiasco, especially once they understood that their “hateful video” legend wasn’t going to fly, and once leakers within the Agency began slipping the embarrassing details of what happened that night to their favorite journalist mouthpieces.

With the congressional hearings looming, it was clear that the administration could no longer tolerate a CIA that it could not fully control, and that therefore an example had to be made of a good, patriotic American war hero, who had succumbed to the most basic of human weaknesses. It doesn’t take a thriller novelist’s imagination to picture the scene: Petraeus called to the White House and being told, probably by Jarrett, to tender his resignation forthwith and both to reveal the affair and cite it as the reason for his sudden disgrace. No fingerprints on the bloody knife except those of the victim, with the added bonus of ensuring his silence regarding Benghazi, especially with the Senate under even firmer control that it was last week, when the GOP was still indulging in its pipe dream of retaking it.

Well, as they say, elections have consequences, and this one’s a doozy. Petraeus has a lot of detractors on the Right, many of whom saw him as overly Muslim-friendly during his time in Iraq and Afghanistan. (For examples, just check the comments on this piece.) But, until he threw himself under the bus, no one doubted the man’s sense of duty, honor and country; indeed, it’s just that sense that likely caused him to resign in the first place; Max Boot has a nice appreciation of the general’s accomplishments here:

Imagine Winfield Scott, U.S. Grant, William Sherman, George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower or Matthew Ridgway resigning over an affair. It’s simply impossible to imagine; standards have changed so much over the years that now sexual peccadilloes are about the only thing that can bring down senior military commanders. Petraeus did not have as big a war to fight as his predecessors did but what he achieved in Iraq was one of the most impressive turnarounds ever seen in any counterinsurgency campaign that I am familiar with.

Field Marshal Gerald Templer’s success in Malaya in the 1950s is usually cited as the gold standard of counterinsurgency. Well Iraq in early 2007, when Petraeus took over as commander, was in far worse shape than Malaya in 1952 when Templer arrived on the scene. Few thought there was any chance of stopping Iraq’s slide into ever-more violent civil war. Certainly not with a mere 20,000 or so surge troops–numbers widely dismissed as inadequate for the size of the task. Petraeus did not bluster and he did not boast but he arrived with a quiet confidence that he could still save the day–and he did.

The problem is, fighting generals (as opposed to the desk jockeys that grunts call REMFs) are not generally wise in the ways of politics — Ike was an exception; Patton was not) — and can find themselves played if they’re not suspicious of civilian authority, instead of (as they must be as officers) deferential to it. And Obama’s nomination of Petraeus to be CIA director always struck me as addition by subtraction: he took a possible GOP opponent and effective critic off the table and buried him across the river in suburban Virginia. A real spook — say, Allen Dulles, Dick Helms, or James Jesus Angleton — always has his antennae up and operational, and understands that his real enemy is most likely masquerading as his best friend.

So the career of King David (as he was known to his aides in Iraq) is over. The Republicans, however, must not let this old soldier just fade away. He needs to be called before the Intelligence Committee and to testify about the truth of what happened in Benghazi, including the real reason that ambassador Stevens was there — which, if the rumors of a gun-running operation to Syria are true (shades of both Fast and Furious and Iran-Contra) could be highly deleterious to the administration, and which might have had an effect on the election had they been publicly known.

Petraeus should welcome the opportunity, and in fact insist on it. It would be his final act of patriotism — and should he be prevented by the administration and its Democratic allies in Congress from testifying, then his forced silence will speak almost as loudly and even more eloquently.

 Peregrine wrote:
So, let's take off the tinfoil hats for a moment: why would Petraeus just quietly cooperate with this grand conspiracy to make him take responsibility for Benghazi and resign with nothing more than a brief "I cheated, I suck, I'm going to go work on my marriage and hope my wife doesn't leave me"? What exactly does he have to gain by being the conspiracy's scapegoat?

 Ouze wrote:
Stop turning to the right-wing outrage and tinfoil-hat machine for answers, that's my advice.

Seriously, please step back, read your post, realize how foolish the ideas you quoted are, and consider whether people reading it will then transfer some of their denigration towards you for bathing in these pools of stupid willingly and sharing with others that you seriously read tripe like this with a straight face.

Presuming you're of a conservative lean, and your posts say this is a good bet, the things you are reading are not serving you well. This is honest and fair advice I'm giving you, straight talkin'. They want you angry all the time, and the best way to do that is to try and keep you marginalized all the time. A successful right-wing does not breed successful right-wing media.

 whembly wrote:
That's what I'm trying to grasp... why now?

 whembly wrote:
Shall I worship the Democrats like you do? 'kay... where's the mess hall sir?

 d-usa wrote:
Once we get past whembly's conspiracy theories that everything happens in the USA because Obama is pulling the strings of all his puppets, and take a look at the last similar time period in recent history of 2004, we realize that unless you want to kiss your political/military/consulting career goodbye you don't leave any of your posts while your boss is running for re-election. You sit there, do your job and wait. Either your boss gets voted out, and you go with him and are free. Or if your boss wins a second term you take advantage that there is usually a shake-up in the cabinet and leadership positions and make your exit then.

He's a military man and he has a lot of experience in the political arena. He knows that "feth this I quit" during the run-up of an election is suicide.

 whembly wrote:

 Ouze wrote:
Stop turning to the right-wing outrage and tinfoil-hat machine for answers, that's my advice.

Seriously, please step back, read your post, realize how foolish the ideas you quoted are, and consider whether people reading it will then transfer some of their denigration towards you for bathing in these pools of stupid willingly and sharing with others that you seriously read tripe like this with a straight face.

Presuming you're of a conservative lean, and your posts say this is a good bet, the things you are reading are not serving you well. This is honest and fair advice I'm giving you, straight talkin'. They want you angry all the time, and the best way to do that is to try and keep you marginalized all the time. A successful right-wing does not breed successful right-wing media.

Oh... okay...

Shall I worship the Democrats like you do? 'kay... where's the mess hall sir?

 Peregrine wrote:

 whembly wrote:
That's what I'm trying to grasp... why now?

Who knows? Maybe his guilty conscience finally caught up to him, and he decided he couldn't hide it any longer. Maybe he decided Benghazi was a failure, and might have gone differently if he hadn't been distracted by the affair? Maybe his wife wasn't happy with him, and he decided his marriage was more important than politics? Maybe it looked like someone was going to leak it, so he decided to resign on his own terms? Maybe he decided to resign a while ago, but waited until after the election so it wouldn't be affected either way by his personal life?

And of course the fact that we don't have a definite answer yet doesn't mean that we should immediately jump to absurd conspiracy theories and turn every question into more proof that the conspiracy exists.

 whembly wrote:
Shall I worship the Democrats like you do? 'kay... where's the mess hall sir?

There's a difference between mindlessly worshiping the democrats and thinking before you post every single OMG THE SKY IS FALLING!!!!!!!

article from every right-wing tinfoil hat site.

Just stop and think about it: is it a plausible theory that involves people acting rationally according to a sensible agenda, or do the people involved have to act against their own best interest and do randomly stupid things just for the sake of making a conspiracy? Is the claim supported by credible sources, or an anonymous "source" on a random tinfoil hat blog? Etc.

 d-usa wrote:
<snip>

Seriously, at this point you are so bent on looking for "clues and hidden meanings" that you are becoming this guy:



Delete the bookmarks, step away from the blogs, join the rational world where Obama is far from perfect and makes serious mistakes. But also a world where not everything is a giant cover-up.

 d-usa wrote:
Because he wanted out, but knew that to leave during the run-up to an election is a very bad idea because it is political suicide as it causes the Internet Glenn Becks to go crazy with the tin-foil.

Unless you know 100% that you never want to work for anybody ever again, you wait until the votes are counted to leave.

 d-usa wrote:
If you are going to excuse all your crazy posts with "sorry, drinking" then it is either time for AA or for me to quit responding to them...

 d-usa wrote:
The entire run-up to the election?

You are the DakkaDakka Glenn Beck

never outright accusing Obama of anything but always posting "I fear this could mean.."or "I worry this could be...".

When it gets too convoluted it is usually followed with an "I've been drinking, I need to chill" post, only to start back up with new blog evidence a day or two later.