One of the creepiest moments in the recent Obama/McCain debate was McCain's insistence that he and General David Petraeus were good friends -- really, really good friends for a really, really long time.
(OK, so his even-longer, deeper friendship with Kissinger was creepier, but let's leave that for another day.)
I wish I'd been in Petraeus' living room that night to see his reaction. McCain seemed just like the sweaty, gross, drunk guy at the bar who won't stop winking and making kissy faces at you even after you've asked him to stop . . .
Ewwww.
Petraeus, you see, is reported to be devout in his belief that a non-partisan military is essential. In an article in the Sept. 8 edition of The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/...Steve Coll reports that until 2002, Petraeus was registered as a Republican, albeit a Northeastern type of Republican. When he was promoted to a 2-star general, however, he stopped voting.
Here's Coll:
In thinking about how to cope with political divisions in the United States over Iraq, (Petraeus) was influenced, he told me recently, by Samuel Huntington’s 1957 book "The Soldier and the State," which argues that civilian control over the military can best be achieved when uniformed officers regard themselves as impartial professionals.
Coll continues:
As he departed for Baghdad, to oversee a "surge" deployment of additional American troops to Iraq, (Petraeus) sought, as he recalled it, "to try to avoid being pulled in one direction or another, to be in a sense used by one side or the other." He added, "That’s very hard to do, because you become at some point sort of the face of the war, the face of the surge. So be it. You just have to deal with that."
And Petraeus seems to be serious about this view. That is why John McCain got into trouble when he featured a photograph of the two of them together as a fundraising tactic. (Or was that a fundraising strategy?)
At first the McCain camp argued that the picture was entirely appropriate. But when confronted by the Memorial Day directive by Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen that "the US military must remain apolitical at all times" http://www.iht.com/... McCain was forced to admit that his actions had been inappropriate. http://thinkprogress.org/...
How must Petraeus have felt about being joined-at-the-hip by McCain on national television in front of millions of Americans?
Not very apolitical, is it? I'll bet Petraeus was cringing.
BTW, this is my first diary, so please be kind!