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Petraeus (rightly) knocked off his pedestal

"The fraud that General David Petraeus perpetrated on America started many years before the general seduced Paula Broadwell, a lower-ranking officer 20 years his junior, after meeting her on a campus visit to Harvard.

More so than any other leading military figure, Petraeus’ entire philosophy has been based on hiding the truth, on deception, on building a false image. “Perception” is key, he wrote in his 1987 Princeton dissertation: "What policymakers believe to have taken place in any particular case is what matters — more than what actually occurred."

Yes, it’s not what actually happens that matters — it’s what you can convince the public it thinks happened.

Until this weekend, Petraeus had been incredibly successful in making the public think he was a man of great integrity and honor, among other things. Most of the stories written about him fall under what we hacks in the media like to call “a blow job." Vanity Fair. The New Yorker. The New York Times. The Washington Post. Time. Newsweek. In total, all the profiles, stage-managed and controlled by the Pentagon’s multimillion dollar public relations apparatus, built up an unrealistic and superhuman myth around the general that, in the end, did not do Petraeus or the public any favors. Ironically, despite all the media fellating, our esteemed and sex-obsessed press somehow missed the actual blow job."

Ouch!    These are the opening paragraphs of Michael Hasting's piece "The Sins Of General David Petraeus" on BuzzFeed Politics on General Petraeus's resignation and the whole background to it.

For more coverage on the Petreaus "fall" see Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian in "Petraeus scandal is reported with compelled veneration of all things military" and Ray McGovern in "Pundit Tears for Petraeus’s Fall" on CommonDreams.

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