Not since the Monica Lewinsky affair have we been subjected to such a boring account of adult sex in the modern age. In US political culture, nothing tantalizes or titillates the media like a sex scandal. Even pedestrian, boring sex with boring people in the boring suburbs.
Even as the baggy-faced, weak chinned, becombovered, 60 year old resigned in disgrace, the political media was reduced to alternatively mournful and worshipful bemoaning of The Great One’s fall from grace. Reporters waxed idiotic on the glorious “battlefield” from which the CIA Director is now absent. What is this idea that David Petraeus is this Great White Hope of American civic life, and the sudden end to his career is a National Tragedy that attenuates the future prospects of our country? Putting lipstick on the Iraq War long enough for us to get the fuck out of there isn’t exactly Ike trampling Hitler. I do believe America will carry on. Alas, military worship is the central religion of America’s political and media culture. Consider how at every ball game, we civilians stand, under unspoken order, pious and dewey eyed, as we are subjected to some uber-patriotic display of military might. And, in the National Security State and the Foreign Policy Community, General David Petraeus is the single most revered man.
At the center of this first ever documented case of unfaithful behavior among the military community is a pretty 40 year old lady named Paula Broadwell. She lives in suburban North Carolina with her doctor husband and two sons. She likes to run and work out. She is the fawning author of a sycophantic hagiography of General Petraeus entitled “All In”. She has sculpted arms and apparently nothing with sleeves in her closet. Her eyes say she’s nuts, but in that kooky, exciting way that men have historically shown little ability to resist, despite the inevitable fallout. It is evident from every posed photo of Mrs Broadwell that she craves male approbation. The Director of the CIA was ignorant to something any high school girl could have discerned in 5 seconds. She is (allegedly) an internet stalking bunny-boiler who is one steel mallet and a pack of space diapers away from driving to Orlando to cap a bitch. If she hadn’t gone full schizoid, would anybody even have cared about the sex stuff? Heck, would we even know about it?
Disclosure: Paula Broadwell has beautiful skin and a great bod, and her fawning slavishness is probably more attractive than someone who, say, sits inside all day with her sallow. vitamin D deficient skin, complaining, eating candy and snark-blogging. Ladies, it doesn’t hurt the feminist cause to recognize that some kinds of women are more irresistible to some men than others.
If there is a sleeper agent in this situation, it’s the OTHER other woman. Jill Kelly, a bosomy 37 year old “Tampa socialite” (?), who serves as an “unpaid social liaison” (?) to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. Kelly has an identical twin and is originally from Northeast Philadelphia – that hotbed of class and erudition. The personalized license plate of Kelly’s silver Benz trumpets her status as an “honorary consul for the Korean government. Most suspiciously, Mrs Kelly, is really Jill Khawam, the daughter of Lebanese immigrant parents.
Like Paula Broadwell, Jill Kelly is married to a doctor and has young children. A U.S. official described her as a “bored, rich socialite” who drops the “honorary” from her title and cold tells people she is an ambassador. This in a nutshell: Jill Kelly has called police four times over the past week to complain about reporters at her home. In one call, she suggested she have ‘diplomatic protection’, because of her diplomatic status. “I’m an honorary consul general,” she explained to the baffled 911 operator, “so I have inviolability.”
I don’t want to be that guy, but Jill Kelly’s face looks like it has been carved out of soap. She’s like a non-bulimic Bethanny Frankel, with the same man made, molded monkey nose that you see on so many women trying to scrape away at their more exotic ancestry.
Jill Kelly has been dragging our 4-star generals down long before this scandal. Both General Petraeus and John Allen intervened on the behalf of Jill’s sister, Natalie Khawam, in a messy custody dispute with Natalie’s ex (Grayson Wolfe, a former Bush administration official who directed Middle East initiatives and Iraqi reconstruction efforts at the Export-Import Bank). Nevertheless, the judge in the case awarded Natalie’s ex-husband custody of their son, writing that Khawam had “severe psychological deficits in the areas of honesty and integrity,” and that she has exhibited a “willingness to say anything, even under oath, to advance her own personal interests at the expense of her husband, and the child”. In other words, she’s a “Republican”.
Mrs Kelley is known for throwing grandiose parties with lavish buffets, champagne and cigar puffing and string quartets. Gen Petraeus arrived at one such party in a 28-man police motorcycle escort (PLEASE don’t say a 28-man police motorcycle escort to attend a party is a waste of government money).
Daily Mail UK has friends of Jill Kelly describing how she would “flirt outrageously” with senior military figures invited to parties at her mansion, that “she was a very sexy lady and she knows it”, and was “very touchy feel-y. Her hands would be on their arms. She was attentive. It’s not hard to see why she had some guys under her spell.”
Alas, the social climber’s lavish lifestyle is currently being threatened by mountains of debt. The Kelleys rival the Salahi’s in the greed and graft department. They have been sued at least nine times. They are accused of using for personal use money from an organization set up for cancer patients. They currently are the targets of at least four indebtedness lawsuits, and two foreclosures: a $2.1 million note they hold on a downtown Tampa building and that waterfront, “million dollar” “mansion” which – now valued at $800,00 – has been in foreclosure for 2 years.
Yup, despite throwing lavish parties that obviously came with personal cocaine butlers and solid gold Cuban cigars, the Kelleys are mired in lawsuits from banks totaling $4 million. Jill’s twin declared herself bankrupt earlier this year with liabilities of $3.6 million. The twins total worth = minus $7.6 million.
The twins’ left earrings seem to sport such enormous blood diamonds that their heads lean painfully and permanently to one side. What a horrible existence.
Boy rich people hate paying their fucking bills! And why shouldn’t they when they are such successful job creators for the catering industry? “Operator, I‘m an honorary rich person, so I have tax inviolability.” When we normal people owe someone $5,000, we are called poor people. Yet these grifters can owe $4 million and still call themselves rich people. Unfair. Citibank hauled my ass to court over a $900 college credit card debt. Yet it seems the banks are giving these good time gals time before a judgement is issued.
Jill Kelley is the Linda Tripp in this scandal, the rat with the semen dress. She received anonymous emails that she construed as “harassing”. She showed these emails to the cyber squad in the Tampa field office. Her fellow agents noted that the absence of any overt threats, yet took it upon themselves to launch an investigation which turned up the intel that the emails had come from Paula Broadwell’s computer.
According to an article in The Daily Beast, the emails were “kind of cat-fight stuff.”
“More like, ‘Who do you think you are? … You parade around the base … You need to take it down a notch,’”
The Kelley Twins are obviously horrible people and who can blame Paula for hating and harassing them? It is hard to imagine that the besotted Broadwell saw the broke, buxom Floridian as a romantic threat. She probably saw the online photos of Petraeus visiting the Kelley’s “million dollar mansion”, munching on corndogs at the annual “Gasparilla Festival” and wanted that Florida trash the hell away from her man. Kelly apparently hates Paula THAT MUCH that she sought to entrap her behind those innocuous and puerile emails. Ladies, unsolicited emails from a rival never works out well. The self-serving effort always backfires.
Hallelujah, the FBI probe into the Paula/Petraeus sex scandal then expanded to ensnare Kelly herself, and our freaking commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, Gen. John R. Allen. Investigators are looking at 20,000-plus pages of documents and “flirtatious” emails between Jill Kelley and Gen Allen, the guy currently in charge of 70,000 troops in Afghanistan.
To clarify: General Petraeus’s mistress sent weird, anonymous emails to Kelley, who was herself busy sending 30,000 pages of emails back and forth with General Allen. All the while, Petraeus is sending thousands of emails to Broadwell too, because he is a giant dork, and somehow not at all busy running the Central Intelligence Agency and suddenly everyone’s Blackberrys exploded. Seriously, 30,000 “pages” of emails? How many ways are there to say “It’s really hot here in the desert, but no as hot as you”?). Is it to late to bring show tune loving, hippie hating Mike Mullen out of retirement?
Am I allowed to just blame everyone here, because everybody involved was apparently horrendously awful in their own special ways? Except the Army Wives, because they are – no snark – fanfuckingtastic.
But there is still another bad egg in this rotten batch. Apparently, long before the this current bourgeois sex scandal got under way, the FBI agent Jill Kelley had complained to about Paula Broadwell’s emails – one Frederick W. Humphries II, a “hard charging” veteran counterterriorism agent – had sent Kelley shirtless photos of himself, à la every creepy guy who has ever done a chest press.
Memo to Fred Humprhies, II: spying into citizens’ E-mails because some friend asks you to is fucking retarded. And it’s the gateway to Army-McMeddler hearings, you bald-pated, Republican piece of shit.
The New York Times tells us more about the the shirtless FBI guy:
He had no training in cybercrime, was not part of the cyber squad handling the case and was never assigned to the investigation. But the agent continued to “nose around” about the case, and eventually his superiors “told him to stay the hell away from it, and he was not invited to briefings,” the official said…
Later, the agent became convinced — incorrectly — that the case had stalled. Because of his “worldview,” as the official put it, he suspected a politically motivated cover-up to protect President Obama. The agent alerted Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, who called the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, on Oct. 31 to tell him of the agent’s concerns.
Translation: The FBI is investigating harassment that’s connected to an affair by the director of the CIA, and one of the FBI’s officers – not assigned to the case – was “nosing around”, aka stomping around Congress in a tin foil hat, planting Kenyan Muslim/Marxist usurper conspiracy ideas into needle-nosed Eric Cantor’s head.
A 60 year old Republican American Hero having sex with a married mother of two, hard to beat this sad story for unsurprising, banal pathos. Except to throw Republican Eric Cantor on top of the steaming pile, as someone who knew but failed to tell anyone, including Home Land Security or the President, until the elections were over and he knew the Republicans didn’t have a chance to smother ANOTHER Republican scandal it in its sleep.
Poor president Obama, who’s looking at his generals and wondering WTF…? I mean affairs are one thing, but love notes and secret gmail accounts and ‘bitch, back off my man’ and saucy emails from old men sent from the middle of nowhere thousands of times, and she said/he said memos for the world to see? Our military and intelligence are now being run by 13 year olds. I mean, hey, it’s not like they have WARS to run or anything but sure, pimp it up at parties and drop it like it’s hot. Meanwhile let’s not forget to eternally “salute” and “honor” the troops who are in fact dying and going bankrupt while they are serving overseas even as their Star-Bellied Sneech generals are pounding Jaeger bombs off some grifter twins double-ds or sex-ing an internet stalker. Is it possible that we could have been out of Afghanistan earlier if our General Officers spent a little less time trying “win the hearts and minds” of suburban strumpets? General Eisenhower had the good sense to have a hot young woman assigned as his driver. No E-mailing or sexting, no wasted travel time just efficient infidelity and a speedy World War.
On the bright side, maybe all the blowjobs and trysts kept the generals’ fingers off of a few bomb-detonating buttons. On the other side, this sordid tale is the kind of shit that makes you want to consciously drive off the fiscal cliff. Sure, most of us will be wiped out financially, but maybe we’ll take a few of them with us.