Political sex scandals seem a dime a dozen these days. Bill Clinton, Herman Cain, Anthony Weiner, John Edwards…the list goes on.
It may be getting a little old and tired – but even the cover of Time Magazine for the week of Nov. 26 featured an image of a military officer’s torso with the words “THE PETRAEUS AFFAIR” in big red letters. Inside, the cover story was rather aptly named “Spyfall”.
Time, like every other news outlet over the past month or so, was lending its own touch to the downfall of General David Petraeus, former director of the CIA until he resigned last month. Spoiled a bit by the bad James Bond pun, perhaps, but they did their best.
I doubt anyone knows the whole truth of the scandal that brought down Petraeus, two women, and possibly another four-star general. But the story goes something like this: according to Time, Petraeus had, for two years, been having an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. Pretty generic stuff. It gets more complicated though.
Allegedly, Broadwell and another woman named Jill Kelley exchanged emails that may have contained national security secrets, though no one really knows. Even weirder, Kelley may have been having an affair with General John Allen, the leader of the allied forces in Afghanistan and nominee for NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander. Though Allen denies the affair, the allegations were enough to put his nomination on hold.
To top it all off, all of this came out two days after Election Day. However, the exact facts of the story are irrelevant. What is relevant is the media frenzy over the scandal.
People obviously had a boatload to say, but I’m not just talking about pseudo-news like People. Time obviously devoted a huge part of their issue to the story. According to CNN’s Howard Kurtz, there is a media campout right outside Kelley’s house. The scandal was even on Señor Zamora’s news intro for Period 7 three classes in a row, which is saying something. Why do we care so much?
General Petraeus is a human being. He screwed up and had an affair. I’m not going to say “we all do it”, because we don’t, but it’s a human mistake. Unfortunately, society at large seems to take these things and run with them, as if they have endangered the survival of the human race.
Take Bill Clinton for an example. We all know he had an affair with Monica Lewinsky during his presidency and probably with more women at other times. But when we think about Bill Clinton, that’s what we think about. Not the fact that he ran a budget surplus or had the best economic times in fifty years, or even that he gave the orders to bomb Kosovo. His affair basically determined how his administration has been perceived since then, even though it was a private matter.
What are we demanding out of our leaders? We can’t expect them to be perfect. It’s regrettable that Petraeus felt like he had to resign. He’s an experienced leader and the country needs him, regardless of what he does with other women.
The media may have some basis for their frenzy; it is suspected that national security secrets were emailed between several of the players in the scandal, and the scandal was held from the public for a short time. However, they blew it out of proportion by focusing on the wrong parts of the story. People magazine doesn’t talk about national secrets; they talk about juicy gossip.
The personal lives of our leaders should not be a bigger deal than how they conduct themselves in office. In the context of Petraeus and the CIA, we should be focusing on things like the bombing in Benghazi, Libya, a CIA investigation that is still going on but has been obscured by the recent scandal. This incident may well shape our relations with the Muslim world for the foreseeable future. Leave the sex scandals in the bedroom and the private world where they belong.
