The Hell Is Going On With This Petraeus Thing?

NY Times reporting this morning that yeah, Justice Department and the FBI knew about the Petraeus affair back in the summer, which means all of Washington knew.  So why the resignation now?

High-level officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department were notified in the late summer that F.B.I. agents had uncovered what appeared to be an extramarital affair involving the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, David H. Petraeus, government officials said Sunday.

But law enforcement officials did not notify anyone outside the F.B.I. or the Justice Department until last week because the investigation was incomplete and initial concerns about possible security breaches, which would demand more immediate action, did not appear to be justified, the officials said. 

The new accounts of the events that led to Mr. Petraeus’s sudden resignation on Friday shed light on the competing pressures facing F.B.I. agents who recognized the high stakes of any investigation involving the C.I.A. director but who were wary of exposing a private affair with no criminal or security implications. For the first time Sunday, the woman whose report of harassing e-mails led to the exposure of the affair was identified as Jill Kelley, 37, of Tampa, Fla. 

So a whistleblower, an FBI/CIA turf war, and agents blabbing to everyone in DC, yet this stayed out of the papers until after the election.  For months.  As I said this morning, Eric Cantor knew in October and certainly could have fried up some Obama hate chips to serve for the last week of the campaign, but didn't.

Consider how much effort the GOP has put into trying to create a scandal out of Benghazi to try to embarrass President Obama when an actual scandal was sitting on Cantor's desk.  It has all the good stuff:  security clearances, potential blackmail, sex, a love triangle among the general, the biographer, and the whistleblower...c'mon, FOX News would have run with this for weeks.

So instead we get nothing.  There's a hell of a story here and I'd like to find out more.  Maybe Bon was right in Sunday's podcast when she said that clueless Republicans who were incompetent enough to lose this election are still just blindingly stupid and fumbled this too (as they liked Petraeus), certainly Occam's Razor bears that out, I mean we are dealing with absolute morons who think dinosaurs and man roamed the earth together like a Flintstones cartoon just a few thousands years ago, and that women secrete anti-rape shutdown hormones to prevent conception under duress.

We'll see.  New tags (since I don't have one) for DC scandals:  Someone Get Me Olivia Pope On The Line and in honor of our friends at the CIA and FBI, Intelligence Stupidity.