Sex, politics, and media Part II -- Mo Dowd's narrative

Maureen Dowd definitely earns her keep in her Wednesday NYT op-ed column explicating L’Affaire Petraeus.  The piece marries her perfectly attuned tragicomic sensibility for probing the psyches and characters of fallen public figures caught in sex scandals with her reporter's skills and instincts for unpacking and revealing the behind-the-scenes dynamics of political intrigues. She lays out a more integrated and insightful narrative than anyone else has, making sense of how both the public behavior and the private behavior of the people involved stemmed from the same roots in their characters, social and professional ambitions and life situations.

One quibble is that in her retrospective Maureen leaves out the fact that Obama did can several military honchos in Afghanistan, Gens. McKiernan and McChrystal. He did assert himself as the civilian decider in those instances, so unless I'm missing something, it's not a simple case of Obama's passivity or weakness.  The sense I get is that Obama bowed to Petraeus on the Afghanistan surge when the issue between them was one of military assessment and judgment rather than one of personalities or job evaluation.

On the whole, Dowd depicts Obama's role in an understanding light and paints Petraeus as the grandiose egoist whose ambitiousness and self-inflation took him too close to the sun.  I had already forgotten how Petraeus lobbied in defiance of Obama, and I had never known that Petraeus was hosting hawkish conservatives over there.  He played with star fire and got his arse burned.  The nation looks to this liberal to be well rid of an egotistical and ultimately hypocritical man in the middle of too many plots.   

For the most part, the best justice happens when a person's own karma does him in. Romney did more to hurt himself in the campaign than anyone else, for example. That last Romney campaign ad about Jeep's moving jobs was just the last in series of moves that showed the kind of man he is.

So in the end -- I hope it ends soon -- Mo boils the story down to that oldest of stories about pride and falls.  Sounds right to me.  It surprises me that she would describe Obama's role as primarily the victim of his own inexperience and Petraeus's ego, as I've become used to her finding angles to make Obama look worse than she makes him out to be here.  I believe she has placed responsibility properly in her narrative of the affair.