And Now for Something Completely Different

Now that the presidential election is over—having turned out pretty much exactly as I predicted it would back in January—we move on now to what Ben Bernanke sometime back referred to as "The Fiscal Cliff," an unpleasantness up ahead that is currently being offset by a scandal no one quite understands. At least they don't understand why what has ostensibly happened is the occasion for a scandal. Anyway, it's not nearly as exciting as Sandy. The Fiscal Cliff should be exciting enough, trust me, but it isn't, because hardly anyone understands just exactly what it entails.

Unlike a guy banging someone who isn't his wife. Still, it's not like he killed his wife and put her body in the freezer and then screwed the mistress, the biographer, in this case, on top the freezer, in front of security cameras he'd installed himself but, in his lust, forgot about.

Now, to me, that would be a better set up for a good scandal, especially one involving a CIA Director. Certainly better than what we have.

Let me just say at the outset that I—like many, apparently—couldn't care less who former 4-Star General and CIA Director David Petraeus is fucking—or did fuck, or even who he plans to fuck down the line once the smoke clears. For my money, he was the best military mind going at a time when our civilian leaders, many of whom ought to be up on charges for war crimes, had got us into two stunningly ill-advised conflicts. That he got us out of the stupider of two in a way that allows the delusional to imagine we actually won something in that ten-year fiasco—I'm speaking of Iraq—deserves as much praise as any general is likely to deserve. He literally wrote the book on counter-revolutionary tactics, and had our brilliant minds in Washington listened to him a little more, a little sooner, things might have gone better. Possibly. Or we could have just stayed out of the place altogether and maybe got out of Afghanistan a lot sooner ...

I know. Spilt milk. Money and lives. Get over it already.

Anyway, Petraeus is getting thrown to the dogs because he had an affair with his biographer, an affair he rather quickly admitted to, rather than, say, dragging out the situation endlessly in the way that, say, Lance Armstrong did. Perhaps it isn't the right point of view to have, but I find ambitious, cheating, win-at-all-costs, lying motherfuckers like Armstrong to be particularly risible, if for no other reason than they lie to the bitter end as though that game, too, is a contest to be won at all costs. I know all about what he did for people with cancer, the bracelets, the attention, and that was a big reason no one could touch him all these years—while his former teammates, and others, other cheaters, had their lives ruined. But the way I look at it, my son got better because of good medicine and good doctors and nurses, and possibly because he got a lot of love while he was dealing with it all, and because he was fortunate.

It didn't have anything to do with Lance Armstrong and his ego.

So fuck Lance Armstrong and the seedy culture of doping he perhaps more than anyone else helped to create and feed in cycling.

As to Petraeus, as best I can tell, he got in with a bad crowd. Tampa socialites. Some would say that when you're the most famous military officer of the century thus far, and your wife looks like the head librarian in a small town and your biographer looks like a thirty-something chick with a thong collection doing fitness videos on TV at two in morning, something is bound to happen. But I'm not that harsh. I would simply say, to paraphrase John Donne, that our military and intelligence services are the less for having a man like Petraeus gone from them.

But we're a country that has a habit of dispatching real talent for trivial sins.

Not that cheating on your wife with your biographer is trivial. But, in my estimation, it doesn't rank with killing and maiming tens of thousands in two fruitless wars.

Still, it's all how you handle your mistakes, I suppose. And a picture tells a thousand words. And I saw a picture of Petraeus and the biographer on Bloomberg this morning while I was having my oatmeal, and, well, I don't know how else to put it other than to say he looked like a guy who'd just gotten a blow job and wasn't used it and thus had that funny grin on his face, and I thought, A real weasal would have covered that up better. A first-rate lying son of a bitch would have looked a little more earnest, more professional, as they say, and less like a teen-ager after his or her first piece of ass.

The media, of course, is used to dealing with the game faces of weasals and cheats and so what are they to do with a CIA Director who just comes out and admits to something—resigns his post!—after a few emails get exposed? A brilliant general who screwed up and then, when caught, owns up to it. WTF?

It's a mystery we're likely to hear about for a few more weeks at least. As we dance around the cliff.

More on that another time.