This is not meant to be a judgement on these 2 men but rather a few questions Why is this such an issue? My opinion is who the hell cares whoever is sleeping with who yet the US pulled down a president a CIA director and potentially the prospective head of NATO and I don't understand why. Is this the US's Puritanism roots coming through (no pun intendedPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image!) or is it something else?
Yes, this is U.S. Puritanism. Christianity is dying out in Europe, and even faster in the Antipodes. The same thing was happening here in the 1960s and 70s, but then the Religious Redneck Retard Revival happened. All the hippies who had been smoking pot and fucking their brains out suddenly started feeling guilty, even though they had actually caused very little harm, even to themselves. So they joined Christian fundamentalist churches, who were only too happy to welcome them because those computer programmers, social workers, etc., were the highest-paid members their congregations had ever had. Suddenly people with university degrees were claiming that evolution is false, and people who, as students, had always regarded Easter as a week of drinking and fucking started complaining about the secularization of Christian holidays. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are the two most common symbols of Christianity in the USA. Christmas has been a commercial event since the 1930s, when Coca-Cola advertisements turned Saint Nicholas into Santa Claus and depicted him as an overfed jolly man in a sled full of gifts that everyone was supposed to buy for each other. Religion was always big in the Bible Belt (the former Confederacy and the Midwestern farm states) but it was rapidly waning in the rest of the country. The Baby Boomers re-energized it and now it's once again a force to be reckoned with. It's the churches that are leading the campaigns against rights for LGBT people (including their apoplectic opposition to gay marriage--they must think it's mandatory for everyone) and women's rights (abortion, contraception, equal pay, getting your job back when your pregnancy is over, etc.), and they are prominent in the campaign to count a certain Middle Eastern racist theocracy (Israel) as our 51st state, while also doing their best to make sure that the one billion Muslims on this planet hate us, and at the same time building a Creation "Science" Museum in Kentucky, and occasionally succeeding in slipping Biblical fairy tales about the Creation Myth into state-approved schoolbooks. Europeans don't care who their leaders sleep with. We don't care as long as nobody finds out.
Americans are loosing their masculinity and letting women control their lives, thus any cheating on part of men in a sexual manner is prosecuted to have men in fear of having their penises out in action where women dont want them to.
Right. Go somewhere else and sell stupid. Only a profoundly insecure little boy would make such an allegation. ~String
Can you elaborate? I'm not sure what you mean by this. Asguard, can you provide a link to the situation you are referring to. I am not sure what you are referencing but you certainly got my curiosity piqued.
Ermm it is about General Petraeus and his affair... Which has also brought to light Lt. General Allen's involvement of whatever sort with another woman (Kelley) that Petraeus knew and both of their involvement with Kelley's twin sister's court case.. Throw in an FBI agent and his topless photos and you have what Asguard has been referring to.
Googling the situation is frustrating. I am finding article after article expressing how some side issue related to the scandal is this that or the other, but I can't find anything detailing what exactly happened that we are all supposed to be upset about. Were the two officers involved with women who are related to another woman and they used their position to sway the outcome of a court case or something? Or is it just a matter of two women who both knowingly had affairs with a married man, fighting over him like a couple of Jerry Springer stooges and the papers are making it out to be all the men's faults? Most of the articles I have read have definitely had a "blame the men" spin on them. As if they forced the women to participate in the affairs, yet I see no charges of sexual harassment. Has journalism gotten so weak that they completely forget to report the facts of cases?
http://www.news.com.au/world/downfa...ling-sordid-tale/story-fndir2ev-1226517041753 http://www.news.com.au/world/whos-who-in-the-petraeus-sex-scandal/story-fndir2ev-1226516271946 But yes, this is playing out like a bad episode of Jerry Springer. Is it the men's fault? Only so far as they were stupid beyond belief, as were the women involved.
That (though the thing about topless FBI agents is new to me) and throw in BIll Clinton as well because the congress tried to pull him down over a blowjob and only failed because they ran out of time
It's amazing how far one will go to satisfy their sexual ego. Even so far as to put the stability of our nation in jeopardy just to attempt to have control over someone (emotionally) who never had any legal obligations to even pretend to love them. If it were me, I certainly wouldn't want to disrupt the workings of our government just to get back at someone who was as wrong to be in an affair as I was. But then if I were involved in an affair, I guess I wouldn't have the sense of relationship ethics that I currently have. But it is true, it seems Americans spend an unhealthy amount of time worrying about who their neighbor is sleeping with. I mean if it isn't your minor child, your own spouse, or your pet, and both parties are consenting adults, mind your own business.
The obvious punch line It is worth pointing out that if you are unable to keep an extramarital affair secret, perhaps you shouldn't be the chief of the nation's spy agency. Yes, that's a joke. But the underlying moral of the story is that Americans are nuts for this kind of thing. After all, nobody really seems to care that this wouldn't be an issue right now, and Petraeus would still be on the job, if not for a shirtless FBI agent working outside his range while entertaining all sorts of bizarre conspiracy theories. And speaking of conspiracy theories, I like the one about how Petraeus' resignation must be about Bengazigate because nobody resigns just because they had an affair. There are, of course, several politicians who resigned their jobs in recent years who would disagree. And while it's true that many of them also needed to answer complicating issues, the nature of the Petraeus debacle qualifies, I think, as being complicated. I mean, I get that someone sent someone else harassing emails, and that was the catalyst; what I can't figure out is what those emails were for. Of course, maybe that's already answered and I'm just not paying attention.
You wouldn't believe ... except that it really is happening Well, okay, there are four main players here: • David Petraeus, a disgraced former General and CIA Director • Paula Broadwell, his biographer and mistress • Jill Kelley, a Tampa socialite with prior association to Petraeus and Allen • Gen. John Allen, outgoing commander of American forces in Afghanistan As far as anyone can tell, no, Broadwell did not decide to get famous; she already had her fame. For reasons not yet clear, Broadwell apparently sent Kelley a series of hostile emails. Kelley asked a friend with FBI connections about the emails; that is how the affair entered the system. The FBI picked up the case as a cybercrime investigation. When the trail led back to Broadwell, the FBI reviewed her emails, and discovered evidence of the affair between her and Petraeus. But the investigation also revealed a large number of emails between Kelley and General Allen. Perhaps the most chilling suggestion is that there is no crime to investigate. Glenn Greenwald explains the situation from a perspective critical of the “surveillance state”: As is now widely reported, the FBI investigation began when Jill Kelley - a Tampa socialite friendly with Petraeus (and apparently very friendly with Gen. John Allen, the four-star U.S. commander of the war in Afghanistan) - received a half-dozen or so anonymous emails that she found vaguely threatening. She then informed a friend of hers who was an FBI agent, and a major FBI investigation was then launched that set out to determine the identity of the anonymous emailer. That is the first disturbing fact: it appears that the FBI not only devoted substantial resources, but also engaged in highly invasive surveillance, for no reason other than to do a personal favor for a friend of one of its agents, to find out who was very mildly harassing her by email. The emails Kelley received were, as the Daily Beast reports, quite banal and clearly not an event that warranted an FBI investigation .... .... That this deeply personal motive was what spawned the FBI investigation is bolstered by the fact that the initial investigating agent "was barred from taking part in the case over the summer due to superiors' concerns that he was personally involved in the case" - indeed, "supervisors soon became concerned that the initial agent might have grown obsessed with the matter" - and was found to have "allegedly sent shirtless photos" to Kelley, and "is now under investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, the internal-affairs arm of the FBI" .... .... So all based on a handful of rather unremarkable emails sent to a woman fortunate enough to have a friend at the FBI, the FBI traced all of Broadwell's physical locations, learned of all the accounts she uses, ended up reading all of her emails, investigated the identity of her anonymous lover (who turned out to be Petraeus), and then possibly read his emails as well. They dug around in all of this without any evidence of any real crime - at most, they had a case of "cyber-harassment" more benign than what regularly appears in my email inbox and that of countless of other people - and, in large part, without the need for any warrant from a court. But that isn't all the FBI learned. It was revealed this morning that they also discovered "alleged inappropriate communication" to Kelley from Gen. Allen, who is not only the top commander in Afghanistan but was also just nominated by President Obama to be the Commander of US European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe (a nomination now "on hold") .... .... So not only did the FBI - again, all without any real evidence of a crime - trace the locations and identity of Broadwell and Petreaus, and read through Broadwell's emails (and possibly Petraeus'), but they also got their hands on and read through 20,000-30,000 pages of emails between Gen. Allen and Kelley. While some might remind that Greenwald is a flaming left-wing libertarian, that would largely pertain to his whining about the surveillance state. For instance, would a scandal like this usher in the surveillance state by having people focus on a non-event, or is it a blow to the surveillance state because it is, in the end, so paltry? We can leave that question to the tinfoils, of course, but there is an underlying point worth considering. When the toll is paid, and the damage added up, what will the final tab be? Congress has suffered seizures over the episode, one career is ruined, another is slipping down the drain, and a third is under question until people can figure out how Gen. Allen managed to exchange as much as thirty-thousand pages of email with someone. The only price Jill Kelley is paying is that some people of no real consequence are looking anew at a shady charity she was involved in. Petraeus is out at CIA; Broadwell is out at Harvard; Allen is under the gun with his future hanging in the balance. And nobody, it seems, did anything illegal. Though FBI Agent Frederick Humphries might eventually have to answer for a few things, including running to Rep. Dave Reichert (R-WA), who handed the issue off to Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), who called in to FBI Director Mueller, who in turn had a chat with DNI James Clapper, who then had a sit-down with David Petraeus, who resigned his position because the FBI was investigating an extramarital affair. Agent Humphries' operational status within the Bureau is currently under review. This whole thing is hilarious in the sense that it wouldn't sell in Hollywood for being unbelievable for gross stupidity. Then again, truth is necessarily stranger than fiction. ____________________ Notes: Greenwald, Glenn. “FBI's abuse of the surveillance state is the real scandal needing investigation”. The Guardian. November 13, 2012. Guardian.co.uk. November 18, 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/13/petraeus-surveillance-state-fbi
It isn't really. Somewhat lacking in detail and understanding, and the conclusions are a little... ah... skewed, but the basic premise isn't far from being wrong.
