General David Petraeus, USA (ret.) is in the headlines again.  The other day he appeared on the pages of the Atlantic, a left-of-center monthly, running a virtue signal above his tarnished four-star fender flag.  Seems David, like much of America, is having a white guilt crisis, albeit in the rearview mirror.  

After 150 years, all those U.S. Army bases named after Confederate generals seem to be troubling David.  There's no evidence that Petraeus ever expressed any angst about assignments at places like Fort Bragg when he served there on several tours.

Generals who find their integrity in retirement are like hookers who find God after the bloom is off the rose.

Last time we heard from Petraeus, he was the notorious philandering flag, an active-duty general who bedded a subordinate, the comely Major Paula Broadwell.  Yes, that's her real name.

Paula was younger and prettier than David's wife Holly, the daughter of West Point's former superintendent.  The general and the major were married, obviously, to others at the time, albeit Dave was a "geographic bachelor," U.S. Army argot for officers on holiday from marriage vows.

Petraeus and paramour (U.S. military photo).

"Unaccompanied" is G.I. Esperanto for an overseas tour without dependents — or wives.

At the time, Academy ring knockers deployed the Clinton/Lewinsky defense to suggest that Petraeus and Broadwell were consenting adults and thus above censure, a defense that is as false as it is moot.

When a military officer beds a subordinate, the relationship is exploitive by definition, a violation of common sense, the law, and the military Code of Conduct.  A sleazy politician might use the "consenting adult" bravo sierra, but that excuse doesn't pass muster in the ranks.

For alpha kilos like Petraeus, words like duty and honor are just words.     

Seems Petraeus now seeks redemption on the iconoclast bandwagon, aligning himself with the Black Lives Matter trope.  Predictably, former colleague General Marc Milley, incumbent CJCS, just jumped on the BLM flatcar, too, by suggesting that Donald Trump was politicizing the military by using it for riot control. 

Military politics has been a Democrat Party tradition since Andrew Jackson (D) cleansed the South of Native Americans using the U.S. Army.  Jackson made his bones as a genocidal military officer and then slave-owning politician.

At one time or other, as many as 500 blacks labored and were bred at the Hermitage.

Several decades later, after being fired for timidity, George McClellan (D) conspired, then ran against Abraham Lincoln in the middle of the Civil War.  General McClellan was pro-Union and pro-slavery, the platform equivalent of a sierra sandwich.

Abraham Lincoln (R) won in 1864 by a landslide.  A few months later, Lincoln was shot by another Democrat zealot.  Republican colleagues freed the slaves anyway.

The KKK, white supremacy, and a hundred years of Jim Crow law followed Lincoln's assassination — all three the bastard children of vindictive Democrat party politics.

Albeit history doesn't much matter much if you hate long enough for revenge racism to become hereditary.

BLM activists now claim that southern generals were "traitors."  Lincoln didn't think so, nor did a postwar U.S. Congress.  No Confederate States general was ever charged with or convicted of treason.  Lincoln, like Martin Luther King, believed in a kind of compassion that is in short supply today.

Losing in a lost cause is not treason.

If Robert E. Lee was a traitor, what would you call James R. Clapper?  How is it that no Trump era flag has made any public comment about the political perfidy of General Clapper, USAF, a 2016 anti-Trump principal and now unindicted coup co-conspirator, along with James Comey (FBI) and John Brennan (CIA)?

What's more political than an attempted coup?

General Milley's mendacity about history and military political meddling, past and present, is of a piece with the Petraeus pandering about Army post naming rights.  Back in the day, when American generals won wars, Douglas MacArthur lost a real political argument with President Harry Truman.  After getting fired, General MacArthur came home and retired with grace, celebrating "duty, honor, and country."

Would that today's brass hats could spell those words.

Petraeus and Milley cultivate the very same partisan politics they pretend to disavow.  As cadets, both must have slept through history classes at West Point.

George Washington was a professional soldier, too, president — and another slave-owner.  If we changed the name of the nation's capital to Chocolate City tomorrow, how would that change American history or do anything for future generations?

If hogwash were holy water, the Pentagon today would be a wallow for uniformed sows.

G. Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of national security.  Colonel Donovan served under James Clapper when Clapper was ACS/USAF Intelligence.