I’ve lost touch with the Petraeus scandal since the Gaza war started, and obviously intense suffering with potentially profound geostrategic consequences will trump in importance a sex scandal, no how matter convoluted and potentially important the latter might be. But I came across Pat Lang’s column from a week ago, and thought it worth citing.

Confession: I believe there is likely  a political or international angle behind the Broadwell–Kelley-Petraeus thing. When I first read of the scandal I thought, wow, how cool that these broads with such whitebread WASPy and Irish-American names were getting involved in such things. It’s a reaction parallel to the incomparable Julie Mason of POTUS, who opined how pleased she was to hear about women over 40 involved in a sex scandal. We older Americans (in both senses) are not finished yet!!

But you couldn’t watch the TV news, and read about Kelley’s background, and not conclude that something other than sex was in play. And yes, I did at one point last week  google “Paula Broadwell maiden name” and was immediately linked to various neo-Naziish sites, which I of course purged from my hard drive. The commenters there did, in crude and unsubtle ways, assume that there had to be various ethnic and international agendas involved. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t. For some informed, cosmopolitan speculation on some of this, read Pat Lang.