General Dismay

Macaulay registration for the spring semester was November 12, but somehow this class hasn't gotten closed yet!

Visiting Professor David Petraeus’s Spring 2014 Course

There are still slots available for this unique opportunity. Dr. David Petraeus, Visiting Professor at Macaulay Honors College, will be teaching a Spring 2014 seminar. "Are We on the Threshold of the (North) American Decade?" will examine the developments that could position the United States—and its North American partners—to lead the world out of the current global economic slowdown. This course will focus on diverse subjects: energy, life sciences, manufacturing and information technology.

Dr. Petraeus received his Ph.D. from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He later served as Assistant Professor at the United States Military Academy and also completed a fellowship at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.

Dr. Petraeus is looking for students from any area of interest with an appetite for reading and synthesizing large quantities of technical information. Students will work together to determine the policies and practices that will best enable the United States to capitalize upon the present opportunities. Excellent writing and presentation skills are a must, as is the ability to work well as part of a team.

Bold in original. Definitely not as snooty as Brooksie at Yale. And you'll be helping (North) America capitalize on those opportunities!

My inside source tells me everybody she knows who took Dr. Petraeus's fall class thought it was really interesting. Well, she does in fact know one.

And in the spring the class will be meeting in an undisclosed location! Via Business Insider.

Cheap shots and expensive lifestyles

De Sacha Guitry à Diane Arnaud.

Please tell me David Petraeus with his visiting professor gig at the Macaulay Honors College, City University of New York, isn't burnishing his academic credentials for that presidential run (perhaps it could be a bipartisan Joint ticket with Anthony Wiener). Washington Post:

Petraeus has a doctorate from Princeton University and has written widely on international relations, military strategy and tactics and national security issues.

He says in a statement released by Macaulay he’s pleased to teach at the college, where most students are children of immigrants. He says he looks forward to leading a seminar on the global economic slowdown.

It would be cool to have one of those certified Serious people out there recommending a fiscal Surge on the Sunday morning shows, though I guess around five years [jump]

Cheap shots 11/16

Erick the Drastick looking for true conservative candidates on the Jersey shore.  Pompier art by Evariste-Vital Luminais (1897).

Erick Erickson at RedState brings out the big guns:

I think it is incumbent on each and every conservative and conservative organization, with this deadline upon us, to make a very simple pledge:
We will not support the re-election of any Republican Governor who creates a healthcare exchange in his or her state. Further, we will oppose for the nomination to the Presidency, any Republican who creates a healthcare exchange in his or her state.

In fact, I will go first.
Should any Republican Governor set up a health care exchange in his or her state, I’ll support their primary challenger and I sure will not support him or her for President in 2016.

Tremble, governors! Save us from the cholerick Norsemen!

Jan Huling, Poopyhead (or possibly Poppyhead). From  Society for Contemporary Craft.

Grover Norquist:

"The president was committed; elected on the basis that he was not Romney and Romney was a poopy head and you should vote against Romney and he won by two points," Norquist said on CBS' "This Morning" Monday. "But he didn't make the case that we should have higher taxes and higher spending, he kind of sounded like the opposite."

Why has the White House not come out to deny calling Romney a poopy head? What are they trying to hide?

Succubus (uncredited), from ViciousMim.

For some reason, the Washington Post wants us to know that Petraeus was fully conscious:

“Obviously, he knew about the relationship for months, he knew about the affair, he was in it, so yes, he was not going to resign,” said Peter Mansoor, a retired Army colonel and Petraeus’s executive officer during the Iraq “surge,” who spoke Monday with the former general for about half an hour. “But once he knew it was going to go public, he thought that resigning was the right thing to do. There is no way it would have remained private.”

But how many months did he know about it? When did he first become suspicious that he might be having an affair? What was the confirming evidence?

Douche.

Most utterly douche proposed explanation:

The Man Called Petraeus had an extramarital affair because his wife was hanging out with Elizabeth Warren (should have been home polishing his medals with the hem of her négligée).

Maybe if Holly Petraeus spent a little less time at the CPFB.......
— Michael Goldfarb (@thegoldfarb) November 9, 2012

Elizabeth Warren and her homewrecking staffers not even in Washington yet and already threatening national security.
— Michael Goldfarb (@thegoldfarb) November 9, 2012

Paul Ryan, numbers guy:

"The numbers we were looking at looked like we stood a pretty good chance of winning. So, when the numbers came in, going the other direction. When we saw the turnout that was occurring in urban areas that were unprecedented, it did come as a bit of a shock. So, those are the toughest losses to have -- the ones that catch you by surprise." 
-- Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), in an interview with WISN-TV.

Not a word guy, at any rate. Or not when he attempts to come up with phrases that are unprecedented.

"Hello my name is the count, and they call me this because i love to count, Ah Ah Ah Ah Ah Ah" . By xxMysticalxx, at DeviantArt.

Desert Stormed

Baghdad coffeehouse, 19th century.

“The first thing I think we need to do is call together the people that succeeded in Iraq, those that have been retired,” the senator continued. “And get together that group and place them in responsibility positions so that they can develop a policy to reverse this tide of radical Islamic extremism, which directly threatens the security of the United States of America.” (Via)

Yes, McCain wants a team of Super Friends under the firm but friendly command of General Petraeus and old Fred Kagan tagging along behind with his clipboard to come and surge those militant Sunni suckers back into Syria, where he can ship them [jump]

Men of Retroaction

Drawing by Ted Rall.

Everybody's on this one from Fiorina just because it's hilarious, but I don't think all the juice has been squeezed out of it yet; there are a few details that haven't been adequately mocked, and a large point of particular significance to the Rectification audience:

to wage war, we need a commander in chief who has made tough calls in tough times and stood up to be held accountable over and over, not first-term senators who've never made an executive decision in their life.

One of the things I would immediately do, in addition to defeating them here at home, is bring back the warrior class -- Petraeus, McChrystal, Mattis, Keane, Flynn. Every single one of these generals I know. Every one was retired early because they told President Obama things that he didn't want to hear.

A lot of people out there are reporting that General Petraeus retired from the Army because of his conviction (reduced to misdemeanor from felony charges when he copped a plea) for passing classified information to his girlfriend-biographer, but this is incorrect; he retired in 2011 to take up Obama's offer of a job as Director of Central Intelligence (that's the job he was fired from for the security-violating hanky-panky). So what he told President Obama that President Obama didn't want to hear must have been, "Sure, I'll take the job." Oh, and Obama still does listen to Petraeus, sadly.

If we just blog about it we won't get dirty

Steamboat Willie!

At BooMan's, commenter Tarheel Dem, passionate and always well-informed (i.e., generally better informed than me) but sometimes just a little overdramatic, writes:

What we have in the US is less an establishment than a kleptocracy in which each individual in an "establishment" position is ripping off the public. The revolving door from the Obama administration is absolutely striking in its corruption.  Chris Dodd level striking.  Erskine Bowles level striking. Keith Alexander level striking.  David Petraeus striking.  Biden Junior striking. 

Really?

Pragmatic sanctioned

I hear the Man Called Petraeus has resurfaced, embarking on his redemption tour with a dinner address to the ROTC of USC in which he may have mentioned his "extremely poor judgment". I think we can expect to see him engaged to Mother Kardashian before too long. It gives me pride to note here that my hometown newspaper, the New York Times, has declined to headline this story, and I had to Google to find a paper that did (one of the Posts, Washington or Sideboob).

Image from Cafe Press.

Anyway, it's given me a sort of disquieting thought. I've been telling myself this pleasing story about Obama choosing Father Brennan to lead the CIA so as to take away their drones and generally reconvert them from their current status as presidential secret army to the good old conventional role of central intelligence agency for which they were originally named. ("I think I'll call you 'Central Intelligence Agency'," beamed President Truman as he tickled the infant outfit behind its ear.)

The disquieting thought is this: if it weren't for the extremely poor judgment of the Man Called Petraeus and the Woman Called Broadwell and their email habits, to say nothing of the sex part, an unforgivable breach of biographer ethics—if not for that, the militarization of the CIA would be carrying on apace while Obama and Brennan sat in the Situation Room chatting about Niebuhr, wouldn't it?

So which does Obama actually support? When the General was running the Company like the Petraerian Guard, did Obama agree with that and then change his mind, or did it just take him five years to get the CIA director he wanted? Or is it not important? Is the program simply to make the agency go, regardless of where it goes in particular?

Does he pick people for jobs and then ask them, "Well, what would you like the CIA to do?" "Jeez, Arne, I can't stand high-stakes testing, but you're the boss." "Golly, Eric, you don't have to indict any bankers if you don't want to, I just thought you might enjoy it."

Old Trump pops off

Wunschmädchen: Iréne Theorin as Kellyanne Conway and Thomas Mayer as President Trump in Andreas Kriegenburg's July 2012 staging of Die Walküre for the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, via Likely Impossibilities.

Poor old Rex, patiently bearing the cross God and Mrs. Tillerson gave him, as reported with tons of literary color commentary by Erin McBride for Independent Journal Review, whose editors apparently don't believe in cutting, or possibly don't exist, but innocently revealing, as has been widely noted this morning, that he doesn't really want his new job:

So why, then, did he want the gig?

“I didn’t want this job. I didn’t seek this job.” He paused to let that sink in.

A beat or two passed before an aide piped up to ask him why he said yes.

“My wife told me I’m supposed to do this.”

A smylere with a knyf

The Temple of Mars Ultor, Rome, completed in 2 B.C.E., commemorating the Battle of Philippi. Ancient History Encyclopedia.

Lt. Col. Dr. John Nagl, Headmaster of the Haverford School, former president of the Center for a New American Security, worshiper at the Temple of Mars Armipotent, and all-round person who likes to find unusual ways of using the word "knife" in book titles—Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, 2002; Knife Fights, 2014—is on the book tour circuit mongering the latter, a Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice (you can catch him with his co-"author" on the army's revised counterinsurgency manual, Gen. Dr. David Petraeus, being interviewed by Max Boot, M.A., no military rank for some reason, at the 92nd Street Y for $45 if you don't mind one of the cheap seats, the night before Halloween).

First look at FirstLook

Drone-bird. AeroVironment, June 2011.

But before I get to Omidyar, Greenwald, Scahill, and what appears at first sight to be a $250-million WordPress blog (sorry, I stole that crack), I'd like to call everybody's attention to a truly important story that is not getting covered enough: about some really bad, no good, horrible practices developed by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan under Generals Petraeus and McChrystal, apparently covered in Mark Urban's Task Force Black (2010) and subsequently blogged in a fine post at Truthout by Gareth Porter.

Sixteen Scandals (continued)

David Brooks can tell a perfectly lucid story, you know, when he feels like it, especially when it's more or less true—truthfulness being a good writer's most elegant technique for achieving verisimilitude, though little appreciated.

Mosaic from Leptis Magna, Libya, via Mosaik.

Not that he's off the hook for today—in fact he turns out to be more than usually slimy—but truthful lucidity is one of the things he does with his column on Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman at the center of the BENGHAZI! scandal, as some have called it:

Cheap shots: Cabinet of Curiosities

Cabinet of curiosities from the collections of the Victor Wynd Museum, via ChurchOfHalloween.

I'll be back later...

@lauriedtmann @matthewstoller This is what people need to get--the model is Central Asian style fundamentalist family kleptotyrannies.

— El Çid (@EnBuenora) November 29, 2016

Petraeus is a felon! (That's what Andrew C McCarthy said https://t.co/o3u7D9Crfs)

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) November 29, 2016

Eleven reasons why climate denier #MyronEbell isn’t fit to lead the @EPA transition: https://t.co/YPCrdR40Vz?

— Climate Reality (@ClimateReality) November 30, 2016

All the fault of those liberal Iraqis. Redux.

Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik (George Melford, 1921).

Taking advice from David Brooks on Iraq, obviously, is like taking advice from Elizabeth Taylor on keeping your marriage stable. No, wait, that's cheap, Taylor never went around posing as an expert; make that taking advice from David Brooks on keeping your marriage stable. Or on anything.

Today he goes back to a theme he first broached a year ago, that the regime installed in Iraq by the Bush administration is just too damn big-government liberal, with its insistence on centralized decision-making, and what they need is some of that federalism (meaning, as ever, anti-federalism). This time he seems to have been spurred by a report in yesterday's Times noting how the Da'esh organization in Syria exploits the rage of the Sunni majority against the Assad regime to make itself an acceptable alternative:

West of Eden: Throwing up Hurdles

In a medieval Persian Megillat Esther, the queen negotiates with the king over the status of the Jews, while Haman, back left, tries to torpedo the deal.

Ex-Advisers Warn Obama That Iran Nuclear Deal ‘May Fall Short’ of Standards

So runs the headline of a story by David Sanger in yesterday's Times, and the first paragraph goes on to tell us,

President Obama’s inner circle of Iran advisers have written an open letter expressing concern that a pending accord to stem&nbspIran’s nuclear program “may fall short of meeting the administration’s own standard of a ‘good’ agreement” and laying out a series of minimum requirements that Iran must agree to in coming days for them to support a final deal.

The bad faith of this opening is just astounding. The letter, as you can see by looking at it, was not written by "five former members of Obama's circle of Iran advisers" but by a "Bipartisan Group of American Diplomats, Legislators, Policymakers, and Experts", 19 in all, of whom

Emperor Trump: Generals may get a little tired of this

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Proclaiming Claudius Emperor, 1867. Wikimedia Commons.

Foreign Policy reports on new insights into the views of the Trump transition, as seen at the department of Defense:

A Pentagon memo outlining the incoming Trump administration’s top “defense priorities” identifies defeating the Islamic State, eliminating budget caps, developing a new cybersecurity strategy, and finding greater efficiencies as the president-elect’s primary concerns. But the memo, obtained by Foreign Policy, does not include any mention of Russia, which has been identified by senior military officials as the No. 1 threat to the United States.

It doesn't mention Iran either, for whatever that's worth; the only named countries in the memo are North Korea and China (plus ISIS or ISIL—both stylings are used, irritatingly).

This isn't equivalent to Obama's view in 2012, in opposition to candidate Willard Mitt Romney, that Russia was not the most serious military threat to US interests, if only because the DoD agreed with Obama, and it was a moment (near the end of the presidency of Dmitri Medvedev) of really warming Russian-US relations, important cooperation on the Syria and Iran issues, and no signs of Russian designs on foreign territory since the Georgian war of 2008, for which the Georgian government seemed (to the USG) to be to blame.

Post Hawk Ergo Propter Hoc

I'm guessing this (from the January 2013 Senate Benghazi hearings, photo by Alex Wong/Getty North America) is more "In the second place..." than "Peace out!" but it does show her fingers know how to go there.

If you saw that cross-head in Mark Landler's book-promo excerpt (for Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle over American Power, being released from Penguin Random House today) in the Times Magazine—

—you might have started feeling a little panicky, and you wouldn't have been alone.

Though you also might want to just take a deep breath and ask yourself what it means, if Carpet-Bomber Cruz, who was still in the race last I heard, doesn't qualify as a hawk. Or John Kasich, who's called for a major US ground force in Syria. Or Donald J. Trump, who may claim (although he's demonstrably lying) to have opposed the war in Iraq back in 2002 but is eager to "bomb the shit" out of it now, and kill all the families of the ISIS fighters as well and send Exxon in to do the nation-building, and thinks Japan and South Korea and Saudi Arabia should have nuclear arsenals. True that Trump doesn't have a lot of respect for NATO, though neither did Donald Rumsfeld. But what's a "true" hawk?

Or you might want to look at the fine print—the part of the article known in the trade as "the article"—and see what that has to say about, for instance, her stance as opposed to that of President Obama:

Emperor Trump, continued

Image via Alabama Today, from a story on the nomination of Tom Price (R-GA) as secretary of destroying the Affordable Care Act. I have no idea why they ran this particular shot, unless Kellyanne wrote a song about it.

So it's my theory—trigger warning, this might make you feel a little sick—that the Romney concept really belongs to Barack Obama, as part of the Trump Whispering campaign.

Yes, I'm old enough to remember when Romney owned the world record for political lies per minute (about 0.76), but that was back in ancient times, before a presidential campaign in which Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Carly Fiorina, some of the most prolific and dedicated liars in US history, making the Mittster look like a gentleman amateur, were themselves completely outclassed by the winning candidate, our president-elect, who reached the stunning rate of a lie every 50 seconds (1.2 lies per minute) during the presidential debates. (Oh, and both sides do it, because Hillary Clinton once said she landed under sniper fire in Sarajevo in 1996, which was not true, but then Brian Williams, who seems to have claimed to have spent pretty much his entire life under sniper fire, still has a job as a news broadcaster, so who knows what it all means.)

Parry and thrust

Update 3/2023: A little discouraged to see how much Russian propaganda I could take seriously at this point almost nine years ago... I still think Obama would have been right to try negotiating if that's what he was doing.

FDR found it helpful to negotiate with the lunatic Great Helmsman too. Image by Reuters via LatitudeNews.

I've been reading and rereading a remarkable piece by Robert Parry, who I think of as a kind of Seymour Hersh [update: LOL] of the blogosphere, and I mean that in a good way, for his extraordinary stories of October surprises in the 1968 and 1980 elections suggesting that your worst fantasies of Nixon's and Reagan's dirty tricks are probably true—this post, though, is about Ukraine, and President Obama's behind-the-scenes struggles with his most implacable enemies, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.

Well, maybe not exactly, but close: it really is about power issues inside the US foreign policy establishment and limits on presidential power, especially as applied in the [jump]

West of Gettleman

Lionel Barrymore in Tod Browning's West of Zanzibar, 1928

Shorter David Brooks, "In the Land of Mass Graves: Are There Lessons for Iraq in Rwanda?" New York Times, June 20 2014:

Evolving views

Oh, you conservatives, you're such ethical relativists!

From Geisha School Dropout.

Cal Thomas, 12/14/2011:

Cal: There has long been a debate in Washington about private behavior and public integrity. Some have argued they can be a lout in private but a stand-up person in public. I disagree. You can't put on integrity like a coat after taking it off to be with someone to whom you are not married. Who you are in the dark is what you are in the light.

Bob: So you're saying that a bachelor president, for example, is persona non grata if he has sex with his girlfriend?

Cal: Let me put it this way: If I am looking for a financial adviser, I am less concerned about how he behaves privately than I am about his ability to help me make money in this economy. Unless, of course, he cheats on his wife and cheats me, too. I just find it difficult to accept you can be one thing in private and another in public.

Cal Thomas, 10/4/2012:

Let’s pick another word – “fornication” – and consider its definition: “voluntary sexual intercourse between two unmarried persons or two persons not married to each other.”

It’s an old-fashioned word that has fallen out of favor, but doesn’t it describe Schwarzenegger’s behavior better than “mistake”?

Perhaps the saddest moment in the “60 Minutes” interview with Lesley Stahl is a video of Schwarzenegger’s wife, Maria Shriver, defending him when he was accused of groping several women.

Schwarzenegger’s interviews reveal a man without a moral center.

Cal Thomas, 11/15/2012:

The resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus over an extramarital affair has raised and will continue to raise a number of questions.

First among them (OK, maybe not first, national security being more important, but stay with me) is why should he have resigned? I am always amused when journalists use the words "sex scandal" when writing about such things. Having abandoned most standards for what used to be called "upright behavior," culture now "tsk-tsks" when someone is caught in a compromising position....

Wouldn't it be helpful to have a guidebook? Are there separate guidelines for military and civilian personnel? Should it be tied to one's security clearance? If the secretary of agriculture, say, is engaged in an adulterous relationship, would that be a lesser offense than adultery by the CIA director, or the secretary of defense? Should one stay in office and the others resign?

What would Carrie Bradshaw advise?

I'm not sure about Carrie, but it's conceivable she could have ended up with Schwarzenegger. Then again she kind of likes a moral center or am I thinking of chocolates? Miranda would have totally fallen for the FBI guy, though, and then regretted it. Really, they have nothing in common.

Anonymous Quickmeme, after a 1793 self-portrait by Joseph Ducreux.