With Kelley, spy scandal plot thickens

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I was hoping circumstances in the scandal involving two people with combined zero body fat would evolve enough to allow me to write a headline that includes the words the "Plot Thickens.”

So I guess I should be grateful for investigators for revealing the existence of Jill Kelley, a woman described by neighbors as “The Tampa Kardashian.”

For those of us blessed with romantic natures, this once all seemed so simple.

Spy meets girl, girls writes book about spy, clothes fly and the late night comics simultaneously exalt the book composed during the affair is titled “All In.”

Enter Kelley.

Everything I’ve read about Paula Broadwell indicates she’s a quality human being. Accomplished in her field, she has the bearing of the thoughtful American scholar she is. In fact, her poise is more apparent than even her looks. And I’m shallow.

Kelley has the bearing of Snooki.

If Broadwell warns me to avoid Kelley, I’m going to listen. Not that Kelley’s my type. She looks like Russell Brand’s type.

This just keeps getting more and more strange.

Now we come to Marine Gen. John Allen. Talk about bearing. He looks like he could drill holes in your heart with his eyes.

That’s why it’s difficult for me to suggest somebody important needs to treat him like we treat our 12-year-old daughter. We need to take away his toys.

Like most parents of 12-year-old girls, we’re wrestling with how to manage her precious tech time. Her infatuation with her iTouch reminds me of the infatuations  our top brass feels with women whose chests are significant for things other than service ribbons.

It’s iTouch vs. theyGrab.

But of the two of them, I guarantee you our daughter is being more judicious than the general.

C’mon, 20,000 to 30,000 pages of messages between Allen and Kelley?

Investigators say that number seems inflated because some pages may include two words like, “Yep, sweetheart.”

My wife and I haven’t in 20 years typed 20,000 letters or messages to one another. And I’m not talking letters in envelopes. I’m talking 20,000 total characters like a, b, c . . .

No one will ever be able to explain to me how a general managing a war has time to type ANYTHING to a Tampa housewife.

I reflexively feel like confiscating Allen’s smart phone and sending him to his room to spend the next hour reading Harry Potter.

All the people who know them best swear Gens. Petraeus and Allen are outstanding leaders and judges of character. Of course those that know them best are fellow generals and now we’re all left to wonder how reporters pried them away from Angry Birds long enough to extract comment.

I predict her infidelity with Petraeus will be the only scandal to emerge about Broadwell.

Not so with Kelley. She will for the next month be what journalists consider an authentic treasure chest of scandalous revelations, even as I question the authenticity of her treasured chest.

It’s shocking both generals vouched for her in court cases and were instrumental in seeing she obtained an honorary South Korean consul general title. She used it to try and bully 911 operators into doing her bidding yesterday.

“I’m an honorary consul general, so I have inviolability,” she said in requesting police shoo reporters from her lawn. “I don’t know if you want to get diplomatic protection involved as well.”

Well, la-de-dah.

This honorary consul general status thingie sounds like something I’d enjoy.

My blog had 323 Ukrainian readers this month -- “Pryvit Ukrainian dryhs!” Maybe they’d give me one. I could get a special license plate for my dinged jalopy and park it in the bar’s handicap spot just as soon as they designate one.

Now you’ve got an FBI agent sending shirtless pictures of himself to Kelley.

It’s impossible for me to express the level of dismay I feel in a world where I, an underemployed blogger with a rat hole office about a corner tavern, feel compelled to scold our generals and federal agents for acting childish.

It’s so bad I am going against my instincts that cry for universal equality and argue it’s time to take discriminatory actions for the good of the country.

Yes, it’s time America bans heterosexuals from serving in the armed forces.

Do it now or we’re at risk of watching them become the armed farces.

Related . . .

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Bonding over spy sex scandals

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It’s purely coincidence the story of a famous American spy who kissed a woman who wasn’t his wife broke the same weekend millions of Americans went to see a movie about a spy famous for kissing women who aren’t his wife.

What would James Bond say about General David Petraeus?

I think he’d be neither shaken, nor stirred.

Of course, the conspiracy-minded among us -- and brain-munching zombies are less resilient -- say the timing of the affair’s revelation is evidence President Obama is dumping Petraeus because the CIA chief knows damaging information about a Benghazi cover-up.

So now instead of dealing with one scandal I don’t understand, I’m now juggling two.

The far-right outrage over Benghazi it seems is because government sloppiness led to four tragic deaths.

History, our most reliable teacher, shows these very same people expressed zero outrage when government sloppiness led to tens of thousands of tragic deaths in Iraq.

I guess murder matters more when it’s not your guy, body counts be damned.

Call me naive, but I’m never surprised when Americans get killed for being American in places where they hate Americans. These hysterical inquiries about what was and wasn’t done in Benghazi strike me as ridiculous. 

And who knew having a consensual extra-marital affair disqualified someone from being a spy? I thought telling pillow talk lies was part of being a spy or at least one of the perks.

You know, “Close your eyes and think of England!”

That’s a cheeky British phrase for doing something -- usually something sexual -- you’d rather not do.

I don’t think that was the case with Petraeus and Paula Broadwell, a woman I’d describe as fetching if it didn’t have such canine connotations. She’s a babe. Unfortunately, she’s a babe with a husband and two dependent babes of her own back home in Charlotte.

She wrote the glowing Petraeus biography with the now snicker-inducing title of “All In.”

Part of me thinks that if someone devotes two years to writing a book that says what a great guy you are, sleeping with her is the least a gentleman can do.

If anyone ever does that for me, I promise I’ll come straight over and clean your gutters.

And that’s not some provocative sexual innuendo. I despise cleaning our gutters and doing that for someone else is the most humanitarian gesture I can muster short of handing over a spare kidney.

I don’t know where this one’s going to end, but I’m hoping it’s not with congressional hearings where panels of serial adulterers spend hours questioning a witness about his or her adulterous behavior.

I don’t see any homeland security breach here, other than the psychic security the involved families are bound to be feeling in their once happy homes.

But it pains me to think common infidelity is going to cost America the talents of this man who has served so well for so long.

I mean, nobody does it better than the spy who loved Mrs. Broadwell.

I hate to think he’s going to be exiled to some murky Halliburton consultancy where he’ll be forced to spend days listening to Dick Cheney predict daily doom and chart how shareholders can profit from it.

It puts Republicans, the party that recently enthused about having him run for president in ’16, in a tricky position. They’re conditioned to publicly abhor infidelity -- unless it’s practiced by party sex symbols like Newt Gingrich.

Obama and the Democrats seem to be in an unforgiving mood, too. They’re sensitive about the Benghazi charges and were hoping to enjoy a longer bask in the electoral results.

It’s times like these I wish our leaders had some European sensibilities. Consensual  intimacies trouble them not even a bit.

They are baffled by our puritanical streak.

They think private infidelities are best left to angry spouses, not congressional committees.

It’s kind of the way I feel.

Even our best spies are human beings who on occasion will lapse into being human.

It’s a mindset over which enlightened souls everywhere can, hmm . . .

What’s the word I’m looking for?

Bond?

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