Petraeus and Broadwell: Spoils

The WaPo remarks on whether the "perks" that Petraeus received may have impacted upon his failed behavior. 

People--including the people reading this--will, for the most part, take what they can get, with the amount of justification beforehand sufficient to get it, and with the degree of mental effort afterward sufficient to justify it.

Petraeus seems unremarkable in this respect, and probably many others.

He has filled the American need for a stock figure, a heroic general, at a time when we had no one currently successfully auditioning for that role, and took what he could from the spoils, while cagily managing the perceptions.

Not cagily enough however, to prevent a driven, likely disturbed, likely eating disordered, likely unconsciously motivated to defeat him adversary from mounting his fame to claw her own way to what appeared to be a top.

Her own prior deceits and distortions evidentiary, neither of them come off so well at the end.