It has been suggested elsewhere that this is basically a script for "Burn After Reading Pt II". The Dramatis Personæ include a rogue FBI agent, previously enamoured of Ms Kelly to the point of texting photographs of his chest to her, which is apparently a thing with the young people (in our day we only had woodcuts). Worried that the Kenyan Usurper was suppressing the story of infidelity in the CIA, he leaked it to the Republican Party, ultimately forcing the FBI to terminate Petraeus' career.
Petraeus Apparently Most Mentally Balanced Individual in His Own Scandal
It has not been mentioned sufficiently many times that Paula Broadwell recommends the Celestine Prophecies as part of her leadership advice.
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BONUS Repairer of Reputations Update: The ghost-writer who actually wrote Broadwell’s hagiography of Petraeus provides an interesting insight.*I certainly wasn’t alone. The unusually close relationship between subject and biographer was no secret by the time President Obama nominated Petraeus as CIA director in the summer of 2011 following his command year in Kabul. America’s most famous and heralded general had granted Broadwell extraordinary access for her book, “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.” Nor has Broadwell done anything to hide this access or her great admiration of Petraeus since the book was published in January, describing him in terms that are, well, effusive.Evidently in the circle of people who counted, it is normal for high-ranking military officers in the age of Embedded Journamalism to have their personal spin doctors, and to build their reputations upon press-management skills rather than basic competence in defeating-enemies-related activities.
No one cultivated e-mail relationships with journalists better than he did; no one could be more personable on a kind of superficial level that nonetheless made people feel good about their interaction with him.Everyone knew that Broadwell was posing as an objective journalist while working as a member of Petraeus’ staff, to the point of gate-keeping his interaction with other journalists... but no-one saw any reason to mention this Appalachian degree of incestuous inbreeding to the people buying their newspapers.
People losing themselves in their own halls-of-mirrors and confusing their own self-constructed media image of infallibility for reality. This is becoming something of a theme in US politics.
* Evidently she was having too much fun in the field conducting research to write the book on which her name is printed, so her publisher hired a WashPost editor / ghostwriter who “sat in my basement in Maryland and wrote what was virtually a real-time narrative fashioned from the torrent of e-mails, documents and interview transcripts Broadwell sent my way.”
16 comments:
I'm glad there's a Florida connection. It seems right for a story like this. Perhaps the tale will also include a long-drive-in-a-diaper element or its Army equivalent.
He fell into a broad well.
~
Petraeus Apparently Most Mentally Balanced Individual in His Own Scandal
Wait'll he eats Obama's face.
Current research
Paula is conducting a study in military innovation. Her work challenges existing theories which emphasize top-down transformations by examining the roles of bottom-up catalytsts and mid-level military mavericks in galvanizing institutional innovation, particularly in unconventional warfare and counterinsurgency operations. In addition to exploring the history of U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine, her research examines the role of one individual who often receives credit for the U.S. defense innovation in the "new counterinsurgency era," General David Petraeus. By exploring Petraeus's "intellectual biography," her research illustrates the origins of his beliefs in population-centric counterinsurgency warfare and American grand strategy.
America’s most famous and heralded general had granted Broadwell extraordinary access for her book, “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.”
Suck it, Ike!
BONUS Repairer of Reputations Update:
I hear Petraeus honed his counterinsurgency skills
In far Carcosa.
Can I request a mulligan?
Petraeus had a thousand kills,
He honed his counter-terror skills
He dallied long in
Dim Carcosa.
The Chambers reference was indeed intended as a B^4-whistle.
What could be more disinterested than having a ghost writer write your book? I mean that way you do get a appreciable distance between you and the subject. Yes, there is that whole sleeping with the subject thing.
Some biographers pay a higher cost than others.
Marvel at Amity Shlaes' ability to get every fact wrong!
Vernon Loeb had complete access to correspondance between the illicit sexytime-havers. It was actually his job at the time to go through the mash notes and construct a narrative from it. Caught totally off-guard. Had not an inkling that anything inappropriate was going on.
Clearly he has all the markings of a veteran newsman - it is a wonder that he only edits Local stuff at the War Criminal Post.
I am not familiar with that Blue Oyster Cult song.
Or perhaps 10cc has gotten back together?
This may serve us by reminding us all to nurse at least a little suspicion that too many of our leaders could fuck up a wet dream, and that for some reason when they do fuck it all up with absolutely no outside pressure for them to do so, no one questions their mental/emotional health.
My on-line psychotic episode had more class than these people in this ridiculous story.
I had not known anythink about Shlaes or her bookThe Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression but I have had genuine personal experience of her revisionism. A conswervative person on a political blog once went all 'splainin' voice on me about the real story of the Depression and the dreadful socialanism it resulted in.
Now, we here are simple but happy folks and I had not heard of this theory and I had so much not heard of it that I assumed that he had boarded the Loonytunes Express and said no more. But here is where it came from.
I can see why Conswervatives went for it when they had Nobel Prize winner Krugman up against lead reporter for the Tucson and Territory Hog Price Index.
I did like it that she departs from reality in the *first 6 words* of her column because her idea of "rigorous research" is to repeat something she heard on the Intertube.
She seems to hew to a combination Great Man / Green-Lantern idea of history, in which everything depends on the reputation of the central person in some narrative. So the New Deal is all about FDR, and by attacking the reputation of the latter she is refuting all of Keynesian economics. Conversely, the reputation of Petraeus MUST BE DEFENDED... if he comes to be seen as a self-promoting careerist then the US will have retrospectively lost Bush's Exciting Wars.
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