Find Out?

Two things about Tubby finally running into the long arm of the law:

1) the Stormy payoff might possibly be the LEAST illegal thing he’s ever done, because…

2) Everyone who is familiar with the joker from his real estate days in NYC knows he’s crooked as a dog’s leg and mobbed-up. He’s just a sleazy little development hustler and always has been.

That means nothing to the GQP/his cult. They didn’t care before and they don’t care now. He’s their crook, and his cons are their cons.

No, the real question I’d ask is “will this change the REST of the country, particularly the mainstream media?”. So far they’ve treated Tubby like any other Republican, meaning when he lies they report the lie rather than simply noting “he lied again” and when he crimes they report it as just a thing rather than "he crimed again".

IF – and that’s s big if and not a given – this gives the press the chance to actually report that this crooked shitbird is a) a crooked shitbird who is b) likely to be elected president again? 

Maybe suddenly the idiot “center” will wake up and turn out against him.

I’m not betting that way.

But at least this is an opportunity.

Wait...

“Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, nicknamed MTG, isn’t afraid to share her opinions, no matter how intense and in-your-face they are. She sits down with Lesley Stahl this Sunday on 60 Minutes."

Okay, we're fucked.

Fools and their fooling

Someone named Michael Knight wants you to know that, while this development gives him big sads because it's so utterly shocking, shocking given the degree to which the U.S. "...laid the foundations for (post-Saddam Iraq's) democratic traditions..., "Iraq is unraveling".

Excuse me while I take a moment to shove my arm in my mouth to keep from becoming hysteric.

You mean that by invading a precariously cobbled post-Ottoman multiethnic kleptocratic peri-state (rich with a tradition of dictatorial strongmen and winner-take-all politics), proceeding to devastate the physical and economic landscape while enabling the Shiite and Kurdish elements that were the last men standing after we defenestrated the Tikriti mafia, we then left behind a perilously unstable entity that is now in the process of deconstructing into a Maliki dictatorship amid the political, social and economic wreckage that "shock and awe" and a horrendously mismanaged occupation produced?

Really? Really?

No shit, Sherlock.

But the best part of the Foreign Policy article is here: "The United States laid the foundations for these democratic traditions, and can still be a powerful voice in getting Iraq back on track."

What Iraqi with a functioning brain cell would want the United States anywhere within the maximum effective range of anything to do with the governance of Iraq? Is this Knight guy completely whack? Does he think that in a mere decade the Iraqis have forgotten Viceroy Bremer and his shambolic Coalition Provisional Authority? Forgotten checkpoint shootings, arbitrary detentions, Blackwater goons shooting up random streets, bags of unmarked cash filling unnammed pockets? Forgotten the massive corruption, colossal ignorance, and hubris we showed turning up with a 30 round magazine and a copy of Atlas Shrugged, ready to hustle the East?

Every so often I am reminded that "we" as in We the People (and particularly We the People in our representatives in the U.S. government) really haven't the slightest clue what we look like from the outside. People like this Knight, who seems to have actually been there and done that, and yet still seem to think that we have anything to say to Iraq and the Iraqis other than "Oops, my bad."

I'll be the first to say that I hope that the U.S. government and its foreign policy agencies have some sort of idea how to help this place that we knocked down because of some lying grifters' lies and then turned upside-down and shook until its face turned red.

But I'll also be the first to admit that we didn't have a goddamn idea when we had thousands of armed soldiers there on how to actually do that. And that for someone, anyone, to try and pretend - and con the U.S. public into believing - that we now have anything more than a whisper of a hope in hell?

In a just world that person would be kicked in the ass so hard that he would be unable to sit down for a week.

But it is symptomatic of the world we have created that the ass of Mr. Knight and those like him in our government and our punditry will remain as soft and pillowy as a fluffy white cloud.

While the asses of those people who paid the bitter price for the lies and the illusions of Mr. Knight and his ilk will be sore as boils assuming that those poor bastards are still alive to feel the pain.

And there is just no damn justice in that at all.

So he picks up his bowling ball and puts it in the sink...

Gee. I can't imagine how anything connected with this slice of genius pie could possibly go wrong in any way.



What the hell is the matter with the New York Times, giving this moron space on the editorial page?

"China’s role in a potential war on the Korean Peninsula is hard to predict." Gee, we can't figure out which way the large Asian nuclear superpower will react to an aggressive act of war on our part...so let's bomb some of their allies' shit and see what happens?



What sort of goddamn fool thinks that way? Wait, wait...I already know - the sort that thinks that invading a crapped out ethnically chaotic former Ottoman Empire Third World kleptocracy will result in candy and flowers?

Haven't we seen what happens when you listen to that sort of mouthbreather?



"This is the kind of pre-emptive action that would save lives and maybe even preserve the uneasy peace on the Korean Peninsula." Because we've seen how well bombing things without a sensible geopolitical plan for dealing with the fallout and blowback works in places like Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan?



Why, why, WHY can't we have a better press corps?

And UT-Austin...WTF, guys? You PAY this moron? For teaching this kind of stuff? And yet I couldn't get on full-time at the local community college?

Christ, UT, for the money this guy makes I promise - seriously, no shit - I could at least produce something smarter than this. I'll bet there are Aggies who could, too.

Aggies, guys. Fucking Aggies.



Just sayin'.

Where are we going? And why are we in this handbasket?

Remember Sammy the Whiny Seal we talked about back in February?

Well, turns out that that Dark Nexus of infomercials, CNN, has brewed a tempest in...I don't know, something smaller and less significant than a teacup. A shotglass? (Probably appropriate, since the whole damn nonsense makes me want to drink heavily).

I won't bother you with the sissy-fight, something about which sailor put two rounds in Osama's ten-ring. Go read the article at the link, if you care.

But here's what bugs me. Back in the day we fought dangerous people. Seriously dangerous guys, people who controlled entire armies, fleets, scads of big ol' bombers loaded with torpedoes and five-hundred pound blobs of high explosive. Guys who could command the actions of millions of hard-core, well-trained, dangerous sons-of-bitches.

Well, it took millions of us, but we fought them, and won. And then went back to work, making cars, building houses, watching television, electing rubes and gomers, stealthily gettin' busy after the kids went to bed. Y'know, being regular civilians in a nation at peace.

We got over ourselves, is what I'm saying. We seem to have gotten over getting over ourselves, if this ridiculous nonsense over who actually put bullets in the World's Tallest Saudi is any indication. Faced with the saddest lot of raggedy-ass fundamentalist wannabees we have let ourselves become some sort of quasi-Star Wars Empire, farkling about all over the world, torturing and disappearing people, and letting folks who shouldn't be allowed to run a raffle directing our politics and military operations that most of us don't know - or, much care - about. We're at perpetual war, and yet, who gives a shit?

The guy who shot down the aircraft carrying ADM Isoroku Yamamoto, who could have wreaked more havoc in his sleep than Osama could have on his Best Day Ever,

"...joined the 449th Fighter Squadron in China, still flying P-38s. He claimed three further Japanese planes probably destroyed and damaged, but he was shot down on his 139th mission, bailing out near Kiukiang on April 29. He was rescued by Chinese civilians, who treated his injuries and escorted him to safety five weeks later. At the end of the war, Barber attained the rank of major and commanded one of America's first jet squadrons. He retired as a colonel in 1961."

Guy didn't get out with four years to run until retirement. He didn't get into a public pissing contest with CPT Lanphier, the other guy involved in the shootdown.

It was just another day at war. And when the war was over - which We the People WANTED it to be - we got on with the business of getting back to business.

Now, this. It's perfect; the entire business of this ridiculous "War on Terror" in a shotglass. Neverending. Inconclusive. Utterly meaningless. But chock-full of noisy, furious bullshit.

Who gives a shit who "killed bin Laden"? We soldiers were once taught that we were a team; that every one of us was important to completing the mission, from the chancre-mechanic that gave us our plague shot to the guy who drove the truck that took our Class V down to the port of embarkation, to the cooks who mermited our hot chow up to the firebase to the guy who pulled security while we slept.

And, yet, here we are; sitting at home listening to a couple of knuckleheads pissing down each others' legs about who shot some scruffy wog in a dirty house in butt-rump Pakistan. And CNN, which should have a pantsload of better things to talk about (How did Osama manage to sit around Abbotabad - described as location of "...the regimental headquarters for the Frontier Force Regiment, the Baloch Regiment and Pakistan Army Medical Corps and Kakul Military Academy..." - for years without our old pal Pakistan giving us the heads-up..?), that managed to pass the tenth anniversary of the Iraq Debacle without so much as a whimper of discontent that the montebanks, grifters, thugs, and stooges that lied us into that Mess-o-potamia (and comprehensively screwed what was going on in Afghanistan in the process) are still with us, nattering on Morning Joe and Meet the Press as if they weren't as complicit as Bob MacNamara in getting a bunch of Americans killed in somebody else's goddamn civil war.

If that doesn't say something about us, and something not very complimentary, I don't know what the hell it does.

Who's Your Daddy?

Busy couple of weeks combined with, sadly, a grim headshaking despair at the ridiculous inability of about a third of my fellow Americans to put down their fucking teabags and accept things like paying taxes as the price of civilization and the lunacy of the idea of returning our nation to the open oligarchy of the Gilded Age that has kept me silent.

That, and March is roaring in like a sorry, soggy, mangy sort of lion and with it the annual stations of my personal cross. Ugh.

But thinking about Bryn made me think of parenting in general, and that, in turn, turned me to a couple of news items pitched at me or dropped on my digital carpet like a particularly noisome headless mouse by some friends of mine.



And, speaking of noisome things, when you have come to recognize the sound of your dying cat's ass exploding it may be that the time has come for said moggie to find herself half in love with easeful Death. I'm just sayin'; the laundry list (and I do not speak figuratively here) of the items you have shat on is getting longer than your tail, cat, and you've shat on that, too. I've spent fifteen years with you curled on my lap, little friend, but this incessant incontinence is wearing on my patience and the overall aroma of the house as well.

Still, it seems monstrously unfair to end a life, even a small life, because the end of that life has become nothing worse than a rather embarrassing and physically unpleasant nuisance.

Anyway, the main reason I started this post is because a friend of mine - who is childless by choice and chooses to continue as such - linked to this article and, yes, it is fucking Newsweek but that in and of itself should not be an excuse. The author's point is pretty straightforward:

"As younger Americans individually eschew families of their own, they are contributing to the ever-growing imbalance between older retirees—basically their parents—and working-age Americans, potentially propelling both into a spiral of soaring entitlement costs and diminished economic vigor and creating a culture marked by hyperindividualism and dependence on the state as the family unit erodes."

But more to my point is that this is a pretty standard screed you hear from the sort of anti-tax/pro-oligarchy types mentioned above; OMFG! We're not breeding! We're dooooomed!



Not mentioned in these screeds - and not mentioned by the author of this Newsweek thing - is that the subvocal corollary of this wail of despair is that "us wealthy white people aren't spawning..!" Or white people, anyway, wealthy or no. The enthusiastic breeding by the lesser sorts beyond the Law - the blacks and browns, both imported and domestic - aren't mentioned. It's the prospective dearth of precious whities that seems to be being mourned here.

That's pretty goddamn ignorantly racist, but, whatever.

But beyond that is the entirely, painfully, bone-stupid obliviousness of the damn thing.

Because the human bottom line has always, always, been that once people - and the people are usually but not always women because women end up doing the most of it - gain the ability to safely prevent pregnancy they do.

I've talked a fair bit on this blog about parenting and my take on it. That take hasn't changed. It's not really hard and it's not really work. If anything the worst parts of parenting are most similar to the worse parts of warfare; hours, days and weeks of endless, mind-numbing boredom spiked with irritating trivialities interrupted by brief moments of heart-squeezingly frightful terror.

So, not surprisingly, if you're sane and not a Duggar the first thing you do when you find a way to have sex and not have babies is to use it.

L love my kiddos. Usually. They're typically sweet and loving, silly and imaginative and vigorous and gentle.



But they're also kids. Raising a kid is often like playing catch with a Labrador; you're gonna get bored a long, long time before the kid or the dog. What's your limit on My Little Pony or tic-tac-toe or playing with LEGOs? I have no idea in absolute terms but I will tell you that it's way lower than your kids'.

And they're also greedy and short-sighted, demanding, irrational, and their intellectual horizon is typically about the far side of this room. They're often whiny, and fight with each other, and my wife, and me. Their little lives are a constant struggle for attention, which is wearing when you're at the stage where you're constantly struggling for dignity and a little silence.


So what did this Newsweek idiot expect? That all those smart twentysomethings were gonna take a kiddo HEAT-round for Team America? That Joe and Molly were gonna give up that loft in the Pearl and move to Clackamas and start cranking sprogs out of her belly like water out of a hose so our journalist can be sure that there's someone to change his Depends thirty years down the road? That those young white folks would throw themselves on the baby grenade so the national demographics aren't all jacked up in thirty years?

Sorry, pal; people don't work like that.

So my bride and I chose to go down the kid road.

But I won't pretend for a moment that that road's been a cheery nonstop ride, or that there's something wonderful and virtuous about it. The pavement's cracked and rough, the scenery's nice in spots but damn deadly dull in others, and there's not a single goddamn way to be sure that the entire journey won't be for nothing when you get to the end and the sign there says "convict" or "unemployed layabout" or "surly lout" or "whiny drama queen". If you learn anything during parenting it's that you get about 1 or 2 out of the 10 things that influence how and who your kid turns out to be. Or IF they turn out to be; this Friday is an ever closer reminder that all that love and care and wishing and hoping can end in a sifting handful of ashes.

But that's another thought for another day.

Sailor Slighted

Came across this article in the on-line Esquire mag yesterday.

The Man Who Killed Osama Bin Laden...Is Screwed is written by someone named Phil Bronstein and advertises itself as

"...the Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden tells his story — speaking not just about the raid and the three shots that changed history, but about the personal aftermath for himself and his family."

It is, as advertised, largely about the raid on Abbottabad on 6 MAY 2011.

That part's just your basic war story, a story about what might be the most famous night raid in recent history, but, still...just another no-knock entry in the thousands the U.S. Army, Marine, and Navy infantry have been doing since 2002. Read it, if you will. It's your bread-and-butter light infantry operation that at least partially accomplished the mission (Just me, but it would have been nice to have hauled ol' Osama back for a Nuremberg-style tribunal, but, whatev'; First Rule of War - Shit Happens).

Hooah, raid team. AAMs for everyone!

Sorry. Army joke.

But, kidding aside, that wasn't really what I got out of it. I've done my share of MOUT, just not with the live rounds and the angry Arabs. Didn't really need the lyrics to know how that song goes.

I did have a strong reaction to the piece, but probably not what the author wanted. What he wanted is pretty clear; to get the reader angry about "...the startling failure of the United States government to help its most experienced and skilled warriors carry on with their lives" Between the raid story the article centers around a long litany of complaints that this guy and his fellow Seal team members are getting screwed.

"But when he officially separates from the Navy three months later, where do his sixteen years of training and preparedness go on his résumé? Who in the outside world understands the executive skills and keen psychological fortitude he and his First Tier colleagues have absorbed into their DNA? Who is even allowed to know? And where can he go to get any of these questions answered? There is a Transition Assistance Program in the military, but it's largely remedial level, rote advice of marginal value: Wear a tie to interviews, not your Corfam (black shiny service) shoes. Try not to sneeze in anyone's coffee. There is also a program at MacDill Air Force Base designed to help Special Ops vets navigate various bureaucracies. And the VA does offer five years of benefits for specific service-related claims — but it’s not comprehensive and it offers nothing for the Shooter's family.

"It's criminal to me that these guys walk out the door naked," says retired Marine major general Mike Myatt. "They're the greatest of their generation; they know how to get things done. If I were a Fortune 500 company, I'd try to get my hands on any one of them." General Myatt believes "the U.S. military is the best in the world at transitioning from civilian to military life and the worst in the world at transitioning back." The Special Operations men are special beyond their operations. "These guys are self-actualizers," says a retired rear admiral and former SEAL I spoke with. "Top of the pyramid. If they wanted to build companies, they could. They can do anything they put their minds to. That's how smart they are."

But what's available to these superskilled retiring public servants? "Pretty much nothing," says the admiral. "It's 'Thank you for your service, good luck.'"

I hate to be this way, but...guys? Lemme sing you a little song I know:

"In time of danger or in war
God and the soldier we adore.
Danger past and all things righted
God is forgotten and the soldier slighted."

Some British grunt wrote that song in fucking 1645.

Ain't no different three hundred and fifty years later. If nobody told you that in Reception Station?

They should have.

I mean, yeah; it sucks to be this guy. I get that. It sucks to be an imperial grunt in a country that is fiercely pretending NOT to be fighting colonial wars, so much so that it that is practically jamming its fists into its collective ears and shrieking "ICAN'THEARYOUlalalalalala!" rather than accept what it is doing to the legionaries it is sending out to do the dirty deeds it doesn't want to hear about or is pretending are the military equal of storming ashore on the Normandy beaches instead of the vile, ugly business of suppressing foreign rebellions in shitty parts of the world.

That's the reality. You can hate it. But you can't pretend you didn't know that going in, especially now after ten goddamn years of it.

A couple of other things;

1. The article is full of sad about how the poor dude is getting screwed over because he's getting out with jack shit; "Anyone who leaves early also gets no pension, so he is without income. Even if he had stayed in for the full twenty, his pension would have been half his base pay: $2,197 a month. The same as a member of the Navy choir."

Ummm.

I know they told you that shit in Repo. You don't do your twenty, I don't care if you're Audie Fucking Murphy; you get squat. Always have, always will. You sing in the choir for 20 years, you get the brass ring. 19.9 years of hard fighting? Bupkis. Them's the rules. You may not like that, but you can't complain you didn't know that.

The article keeps talking about the Shooter "retiring". Dude; this guy ain't "retiring". He's ETSing short of retirement. Get your military terminology straight, Phil. And if you ETS short of your 20-year letter, you get...? C'mon, say it with me now..."jack"...and what else?

"Shit?"

Sorry, man. That's how it works. If the author didn't get that somebody he talked to should have squared him away. It makes the guys in ST6 sound like whiners, and I'm sure they wouldn't want that.

And this guy is described as all jacked up physically (which I believe; 16 years as a grunt would have crocked me up. Hell, they DID, in a way.). Why isn't he getting out on a medical? You CAN retire medically short of twenty. Why no discussion about that?

Next?

2. Here's the thing that completely baffled me; there's a ton of talk in this article about how special these special operators are, how any CEO and Wall Street firm and school district should be killing themselves to get them, how they're the best of the best of the best?

So where the hell was the Navy re-up guy?

The Shooter says he doesn't want to be a shooter any more. OK, fine. I'm not a squid but I'll bet there's tons of jobs in the USN that don't require a guy to bust a cap in Abu's ass. PAC clerk? Third shop? Stores? Chief of the Boat?

Plus, if these guys really were all self-actualizing and entrepreneurial as the article implies, wouldn't you think that the USN would be begging them to stay in and provide all this special leadership as senior NCOs.

Over at MilPub Al just talked about the importance of those salty old Navy chiefs; why isn't this guy moving on from the hard-core hooah infantry fun to a cushy job the regular Navy? Beer and skittles aboard a carrier? Why isn't he heading up the path towards CPO? Why doesn't anyone in this article talk about these guys as future Master Chief Petty Officers of the Navy, as the future Kings of the Goat Locker?

Could it be...that for all the stuff in the article about how special these guys are, when you come down to it - with 16 years in the Navy this Shooter has about the same experience with troop leadership and organizational management as an infantry squad leader, an E-6 on his second or even the end of his first enlistment?

And that the sort of senior leadership you need to have to be a good Chief Petty Officer for a big organization - running a division or being Chief of the Boat - or even be a good teacher, or a stockbroker...requires more, and very different, skills than just "a fist to the helmet"?

And that these guys have, in essence, been frozen in place as infantry squaddies for more than a decade?

There's always been tension between the special operations organizations and the line dogs, but one of the reasons for that is this; these guys ARE good. They're among the best light infantrymen in the world. As a former grunt medic, I gotta respect that.

But.

That's ALL they are.

The Regular Army's problem with senior SF NCOs has always been that - short of the supposed-wartime mission of creating indig armies - an E-7 in SF is a nothing more than a super squad leader. He doesn't even get the experience of leading a platoon of grunts, let alone the experience with combined arms and the logistic and operational business of troop-leading in a combined arms battle.

So could it be that the reason the Navy re-up NCO wasn't chasing this guy is that even with 16 years in he's not really considered all that terrific as a potential line Navy chief?

I don't know, but it makes me wonder; is the Navy and, by inference, the other services doing these guys any favors allowing them to, or making them, make a home in these special operations units? If they really don't have any civilian skills, shouldn't we be making it easy for them to do their thirty years in the Navy (or Army, or Marines) and retire full of years, honors, and a fat pension?

Makes me wonder, anyway.

And finally...

3. There's the obligatory hat-tip to the Crazy Mad National Defending Skilz that these wars are supposed to have been All About; "The Shooter himself, an essential part of the team helping keep us safe since 9/11, is now on his own."

Don't get me wrong. This guy and his teammates have been fighting hard. They've been doing everything they've been asked to do, and more.

But a lot of that fighting has had nothing to do with "keeping us safe."

Everything they did in Iraq?

Not.

A hell of a lot that went down in Afghanistan, that involved chasing angry tribesmen around and around the mountains?

Not.

And the other stuff? The secret wars in places like Yemen and Somalia?

Who the hell knows? But probably some yesses, some noes.

Look. I was a soldier for years. In a lot of ways I'm still stuck inside the Green Machine. I want my soldier brothers - and that includes this guy, who for all that he wore blue, has fought as a grunt for more than a decade - to get the best life they can out of the nation and the People who employ them.

But I think that a big part of that means that the People should get the whole story about our guys; good, bad, and indifferent. And told straight out, without the attempt to "sell" the guys to the Public. I think that the Public might, just might, for one thing, start wondering why these guys have been doing this for twelve years, and whether it is really "keeping us safe", and whether there might be better ways to do this both for us and for them.

And I don't think that a big part of this article really helps with that instead of just turning it into another war story.

So; question - what do you think? Am I reading too much into this? Is this sort of article part of the problem, part of the solution, both, or neither?

Where the Wild Things Aren't

Speaking of wilderness, and since the small predators that live among us are on my mind (Little Cat has been doing nastily worse over the past week) I note in passing the summary of this "research" that appeared in the N.Y. Times:

"...the domestic cat as one of the single greatest human-linked threats to wildlife in the nation. More birds and mammals die at the mouths of cats, the report said, than from automobile strikes, pesticides and poisons, collisions with skyscrapers and windmills and other so-called anthropogenic causes."

(Cautionary note: the full article is likely behind the NYT paywall...)

While the Fire Direction Center has housed two of these fearsome predators for over ten years and as such has seen tangible proof of the moggies' ability to take various furred and feathered prey, I'm still not sure that I buy this story of the domestic cat as Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.

For one thing, it goes a long way towards absolving us hairless monkeys for all the other things we do that are tremendously effective in destroying wild animals. As Erik Loomis notes; humans in general are the single worst thing for wildlife on the living Earth. "Worse than land mines, worse than nuclear meltdown."

Perhaps the single greatest "story" of the last 200 years of life on Earth has been the emergence of humans as something beyond the global apex predator. Cats, dogs, tigers, sharks...all have to do their killing retail. We can literally reshape the earth. We level mountains, fill in canyons, we seem to be changing the global climate.

I'm not trying to argue against the conclusion that people need to neuter their pets, need to stop dumping them into fields and streets, should really keep them inside, or not keep them at all if "inside" is just too damn small for an animal to live comfortably (or if they are simply left outside in a yard bored out of their doggie skulls.

What I am saying is that the Great American Public - 95% of Joe and Molly Lunchpail (rising to 99.8% if they have any sort of Tea Party membership card somewhere on their person or a Romney sticker on their car) - is dumber than a goddamn stump about scientific facts in general, and this sort of "reporting" does them no favors.

Remember this when your Uncle Alex, the teabagging appliance salesman, tells you for the zillionteenth time how Global Warming isn't the problem, feral cats are the problem.

Swallowed Whole

The Petraeus-Broadwell Affair has reached the "second-time-as-farce" stage already and the sheets aren't even cool yet.

Matt Taibbi has the definitive comment on the entire nonsensical deal;

"Then it hit me – it was an interesting book, after all! Because if you read All In carefully, the book's narrative tone will remind you of pretty much any other authorized bio of any major figure in business or politics (particularly in business), and it will most particularly remind you of almost any Time or Newsweek famous-statesperson profile.

Which means: it's impossible to tell the difference between the tone of a reporter who we now know was literally sucking the dick of her subject and the tone of just about any other modern American reporter who is given access to a powerful person for a biography or feature-length profile."

And that's pretty much all you need to ever, ever know about this nonsense.

It's not nearly as much about sex. Or corruption. Or bending and breaking what are supposed to be common-sense rules preventing fallable people from using power for their own selfish benefit.

As it is about that we've chosen to treat the Wealthy and Powerful - in our media, in our laws, in our government, in our daily lives - as if they were speshul snowflakes deserving of fellatio-level fawning.

And nothing good - nothing for those of us on the lips-side of this little arrangement - is going to...come of that, shall we say?