Petraeus and the Shlock Doctrine
By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - 0 Comments
Is this a sex scandal, a security scandal, a new hybrid or none of the above? Anne Kingston explains.
FBI agents search the home of Petraeus' mistress Paula Broadwell on Nov. 13, 2012 in Charlotte, North Carolina (Streeter Lecka/Getty)
We’re now into day five of the constantly unraveling, can’t-look-away-from, still-too-early-to-properly-identify-what-it-is mess triggered by CIA director David Petraeus’s surprise resignation on Friday, which arrived just in time to more than fill the post-election news vacuum. Yesterday brought a “shirtless FBI agent” and a ”psychologically unstable” twin, And new reports accuse Petraeus’s replacement in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, of sending between 20,000 and 30,000 pages of “potentially inappropriate” emails to another women enmeshed in the case.
And the questions are piling up: Why exactly did Petraeus resign? Did the U.S.’s top spy really think sex-mailing in the draft folder of an unprotected Gmail account wouldn’t be untraceable? What does an “unpaid social liaison” do? Did Petraeus break martial law? What does this all have to do, if anything, with Benghazi? And. most perplexingly: Why is Chuck Klosterman writing the New York Times‘ Ethicist column?
