Is it just me or is the Petraeus sex scandal…

… a giant manufactured distraction from the so-called Grand Bargain that Congress is negotiating now to deprive us of the social insurance programs we paid for in advance?

Sex scandals are as old as the hills.  We need to stop acting like they’ll stop the earth from turning and start take a more French attitude about them.  Do you know how many of their leaders have done things that would give the Villagers distracting gossip for years to come?  How about almost all of them.  They’ve all had affairs or mistresses or children whose births were not consecrated by the marital bond.  At some point in their history, probably right after The Terror or maybe it was the Nazi Occupation, the French started to realize that if they took every person who’d ever had a sexual indiscretion out of their leadership ranks, they would still be begging for bread and run over by rich aristocrats or living in fear or some crazy German.

And Petraeus is not even that important.  Oh, sure, the CIA is an important department and spies and all that.  But Petraeus is never going to be president, at least not now.  It’s very rare for former military generals to get to be president.  Eisenhower was the last one and I can only think of one other- Ulysses S Grant.  Grant was corrupt in a completely different way not having anything to do with sex. But I don’t care about Petraeus.

I don’t care about Petraeus’s tawdry, Jerry Springeresque love life where one mistress texts another mistress telling her to keep away from her man.  Can’t you picture it?  Two heavily made up women in skin tight clothing fighting over some skinny dude with a mullet?  He’s sitting there in the background with a bemused look on his face as the camera pans over the scene but he’s actually trying to figure out how he can talk them into a threesome.

Um, that’s not going to keep the heat on when we’re 65 and have to wait 5 additional years for our social security benefits to kick in.

I used to think that the politicians were going to put so much economic pressure on the American people that we would take the deal of immediate relief  and give up our claims to our pre-paid deferred compensation.

But that’s not really how it is.  It’s the politicians who are trading our futures for their short term relief.  Why are we not talking about that?  And why don’t we all vow to keep ourselves in good physical shape so that we can seek out and find all of the young congressmen and Senators who are going to sell us out?  Let’s make a promise to never leave them alone if they cut this deal for as long as they live.  Even after they retire from Congress or are voted out, let’s make it our mission to remind them every day of their lives that we are still here and we will remember and make sure they remember and that for them, the pressure will never, ever let up.  There will never be any short term relief for any young member of Congress who bargains away our prepaid retirement benefits.  We will be the albatross that hangs around their necks until the day they die.