I once interviewed for a job at the CIA and I had to fill out a form detailing everything questionable I had ever done in the past. As the interviewer explained it to me, “We don’t care if you smoked marijuana in college or had sex with another man, but we need to know it now and we need to know you don’t do it any more.”

She is also currently under investigation, which is solid.

Besides, all morality aside, it is incomprehensible from a purely tactical perspective. Do you really think the Administration would piss off a potentially damaging witness by destroying his career just prior to his testimony? Besides, the testimony would come after the election anyway, and could have no effect on it. That makes absolutely no sense. If anything, if what you are snarkily alluding to were true, the Administration should be doing everything it can to cover this up, to keep him OUT of trouble and stay on his good side, not throwing him under the bus.

If you want an alternative scenario that explains the facts much better (albeit an equally speculative and unsubstantiated one), try this one on for size. He was being blackmailed into giving false damaging testimony against the Administration by some right wing thug extortionist, and Petraeus realized the only honorable way of escaping the dilemma was to come clean with the dirt and fall on his sword.

In the film Seven Days in May, a very similar situation is portrayed in which Colonel Jiggs Casey (Kirk Douglas) gathers evidence of an extramarital affair to use against JCS Chairman General Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster) in a blackmail scheme like I describe above. Ah yes, Art foreshadows Life. You should go to the movies more often, it would have spared you this embarassment.

You’re trying to Reason while Conservative again, TB. You know you can’t do both at the same time. The bile rises into the lizard brain and interferes with the higher functions.