The Republicans have once again proven their total disconnect from how the world really works with their latest freakout over MoveOn.org's "General Betray Us" ad.  The sojer groupies are outraged--outraged, I say!--that somebody dared poke fun at the guy who was responsible for those 200,000 small arms that simply disappeared on their way to the Iraqi Army's own arsenal because he saw how anybody who challenged Monkey Boy's set-in-stone views of how Iraq is going suddenly found themselves unemployed shortly thereafter and chose to keep his career instead of doing his job.  The public is ticked off that Petraeus made a sales pitch reiterating Monkey Boy's existing claims instead of giving us an unvarnished sitrep and establishing what is needed to make Iraq functional, if that's at all possible.

Here's something that's going to make the sojer groupies even more incensed: this is neither the first time nor the last somebody's taken derided an officer.  If you read any given enlistee's war memoir, you'll find some rather low opinions of officers.  The screenwriter who adapted Anthony Swofford's Jarhead even stated in the DVD commentary that the major Dennis Haysbert plays in the movie is essentially every officer he'd dealt with when he was in 'Nam.  To make things worse, even officers have low opinions of officers who outrank them: my father was an Army captain, and he said when this came out that lieutenant colonels were the bane of his existence.  And then there's the fact that Admiral Fallon (AKA "CINCCENTCOM," "Petraeus' Boss") has extremely low opinions of the man, considering him a brownnosing coward (his actual words are too profane for a Rated TV-14 commentary such as this). 

Finally, there is the sad truth that flag officers have traditionally been political appointees who, UCMJ Article 88 aside, are expected to unquestioningly do whatever the head of state tells them to do; just look at Peter Pace and John Abizaid.  If they can't or won't, they retire voluntarily or otherwise, and that's the end of it; just look at Army Chief of Staff General Shinseki, who was forced out because he insisted that it would take triple the number of men currently in Iraq to actually crush the rebellion.  Two cousins of mine were career military--one in Army Intell, the other in Air Force Procurement--and they both retired as colonels.  It took severe coaxing to get John Glover, the man who got Washington across the Delaware River, to accept a promotion to general because he really preferred being a colonel.  SEAL Team Six founder Richard Marcinko, a Navy captain himself, repeatedly denounced a rear admiral character in his fiction books.

Petraeus is a Monkey Boy crony, not the New Jesus like we were all led to believe.  Deal with it.