You Can't Take the Harlot Out of Charlotte.

Dilworth, Charlotte: Mistressville, U.S.A.? - The Daily Beast

Another odd coincidence: the Charlotte suburb where the sex scandals of the 2008 and 2012 election cycles can meet at the same nail salons and pilates studios.

Today's Reading List

Here's an interesting column on  the risks we sometimes take.... falsely assuming, like General P and his "biographer", that our cyber lives are private.

And here's another one, by a WW II General's grandson on his belief that the good General was a figment of his own self promotion, and not the great military leader he has been portrayed as by a fawning press. I particularly liked that last three paragraphs:

The generals who won World War II were the kind of men who, as it was said at the time, chewed nails for breakfast, spit tacks at lunch and picked their teeth with their pistol barrels. General Petraeus probably flosses. He didn’t chew nails and spit tacks, but rather challenged privates to push-up contests and went out on five-mile reveille runs with biographers. 

His greatest accomplishment was merely personal: he transformed himself from an intellectual nerd into a rock star military man. The problem was that he got so lost among his hangers-on and handlers and roadies and groupies that he finally had his head turned by a West Point babe in a sleeveless top. 

If only our political leadership, not to mention the Iraqi and Afghan insurgencies, had known how quickly and hard he would fall over such a petty, ignominious affair. Think of how many tens of thousands of lives could have been saved by ending those conflicts much earlier and sending Dave and his merry band of Doonesbury generals to the showers.

What We Know So Far....

If any story can draw Mick out of the blogger weeds it’s the ongoing Patraeus Brouhaha. So for those of you not following this in the minute detail that some of us have stooped to, here is a brief update:

It started when a certain buff female West Point grad, out of the Army and into Harvard, sidled up to a certain General at a post-lecture dinner to fawn and flatter. They exchanged cards and email addresses. The relationship blossomed over time, as she got tongues wagging among the press and the General's aides about why she was getting such unusual "access" to the supreme commander of our troops in Afghanistan.

After Paula Broadwell was booted out of her Harvard Ph. D. program, she gave new meaning to the term “embedded”. She was summoned to Afghanistan for desert run “interviews” with her new “mentor”. (I’m still waiting for the post run shower scene. There must have been a lot of dust to wash off.)

She turned her Harvard spurned dissertation into a book with the clever sexually charged name “All In”, and got a six figure advance, but only with the help of  a ghost writer  (I only thought celebrities needed ghost writers, but she was just planning ahead to future notoriety, I suppose).

Paula’s book tour featured arm and shoulder baring tops, no doubt to distract the likes of Jon Stewart from asking her to define “embedded”.

She gave speeches bragging about her access to classified information, and used her celebrity to raise money for GOP candidates

Of course, we are to believe that this “mentor / mentee” relationship did not evolve into something more carnal until after the General retired from the Army to become chief spook, as the Army frowns on “adultery”. So maybe there is no Afghan shower scene in the tell all book sure to come, after all? Bummer. Clearly, Paula was looking forward to the General's transition to civilian life, because she got a front row seat for his confirmation hearing, though on the other end from the Mrs.

Things were looking up for Paula, as she settled into the life as the CIA Director's consort in our nation's capitol. But then she noticed an "other woman", Jill Kelley, with her identical,  cleavage baring twin sister. Together they engaged in  socialite hi-jinks involving the top dogs at McGill Air Force base in Tampa.

She and her doctor husband host lavish parties for the Tampa based brass, with champagne fountains and caviar bars, but don’t pay their mortgage. She somehow becomes an honorary consul for South Korea, though she is of Lebanese ancestry. And she drops General P’s name to hustle big consulting fees by exploiting those South Korean connections.

Associates describe Jill as flirtatious with the Generals who come to her parties, and she gets a special pass to visit the Air Base as a “Friend of McGill”.

She parties with General P., while trading thousands of emails with his Afghan successor, General Allen, who, we are told by his colleagues, is simply a courtly southern officer who uses the term “sweetheart” only in purely platonic terms. Could there really be 20,000 pages of these “platonic” emails between Jill and General Allen?  Hard to comprehend. But at least they still teach Plato at West Point.

Jill persuades Generals Allen and Petraeus to send letters in support of her sister in a sordid custody dispute. The sister reportedly dates former Florida Governor, Charlie Crist, an old tanning buddy of the lovely Molly.  But, Charlie laughs it off, like so many other rumors of his sexually ambiguous adventures. We're still waiting from an explanation from US Senator Marco Rubio though, darling of the Cuba Libre crowd and a potential Presidential contender in 2016.

Somehow Paula gets wind of Jill’s perceived to be predatory behavior. She creates an email account titled “KelleyPatrol”, to warn General Allen about this overtly social climbing hussy. She sends more emails to Jill, warning her to back off General P.

Jill, alarmed at these “threatening” emails, takes them to a buff right wing FBI guy, Fred Humphries,  who had sent her those cute emails with his shirt off, posing next to some bullet riddled dummies.

To impress Jill, Fred makes sure the local FBI cyber squad delves into those "back off bitch" emails, lickity split. A search order is obtained. Apparently it did not occur to Jill that in their diligence investigating her complaint, the FBI cyber sleuths might want to check out her in-box as thoroughly as Fred would like to, and discover all those emails with General Allen.

Over the summer, Jill tried to call off the FBI dogs, but, alas, the catfight was already out of the bag.

The FBI tracked “KelleyPatrol” to Paula, who’s less than cracker jack reserve intelligence officer espionage trade craft may explain why she was booted from that Harvard Ph.D. program. And when the FBI started trolling through Paula's anonymous email accounts and computer memory, what did they find but her smutty correspondence with the Director of the CIA, apparently including a “sex under the desk” reference. (We're still not sure if that was real or simply aspirational).

When confronted with the evidence by the FBI, both the General and his embedee had to confess to their “inappropriate (if ever so hot0 relationship”. But was there any harm but to their own marriages? Who knows?

Now all of this may have been swept under a well deserved rug.  After all,  having sex with the CIA Director is no crime.  But there was one messy complication: Fred, the semi-naked FBI guy, apparently became convinced that his FBI bosses were engaged in a cover-up to protect a certain President with a questionable birth certificate and socialist agenda.  (Fred apparently saw himself as  the David Duchovney character in the X-Files.)  Before the election, Fred took this story to GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. The story was now out into the political realm, and the FBI knew it, after Cantor phoned the office of the FBI Director with the tawdry story of extracurricular sex at Langley that Fred had fed him.

The Case was almost closed. No harm no foul, right? But with Cantor in the loop,  the White House had to know about it too, because  the story was out into the political realm where it ultimately would leak like a punctured 5 year old condom.

Poor General P. and his buff, domme-ish lover. And their families. They are now just defenseless chum in the DC scandal machine. 

And the Defense Department's Inspector General has a team trolling through the emails between Jill and her other General friend to see what level of flirtation might disqualify him from being commander of NATO.

And what about our heroine Jill, who started this “bitch-hunt” when she sought out FBI Fred’s help?

She and her "not dating Charlie Crist" sister have been seen THREE TIMES at the White House in the last two months, dining with a yet to be named low level White House staffer who purportedly met these upstanding citizens on a recent trip to McGill Air Force base. Most recently, Jill and her family were on a White House tour the Sunday before the election, only days before all this brouhaha hit the fan.

That low level staffer has some 'Splainin' to do!

For Our WC, In Lieu of Severance Pay

First snow. Northern New Mexico. November 2009.