The thirteen-year-old boy in me* thanks the Washington Post for thinking up another reason to run a picture of Jill Kelley’s mighty bust, shown above, but the news value the Post obtained by rummaging through Jill’s emails to the hapless (or stupid) Marine Gen. James N. Mattis, discussed in the accompanying article, is hard for me to find.
I guess it’s true that anyone who has so little going on her life that she will devote time and effort to becoming both “Honorary Ambassador to Central Command in Tampa† and Honorary Consul for the Republic of Korea” deserves to be held up to public ridicule, but, on the other hand, anyone who longed so fervently to be in the public eye but then found herself there because she’d been cybernetically bitch-slapped by a fellow four-star groupie with an ego (if not a bosom) of even more monumental proportions (aka Paula Broadwell) has perhaps suffered enough. I soon grew weary of hearing of the follies and fantasies of former Virginia first lady Maureen McDonnell, who was, after all, convicted of real crimes in a real trial. Can’t we read about stupid men for a while?
Afterwords
The Post does wonder why Mattis, once commander of all U.S. forces in Afghanistan, would waste his time engaging in an aimless email correspondence with a stateside ditz. Well, if you were posted in a pestilential hellhole, watching your career go slowly down the drain, chatting with Jill Kelley might be the least stupid thing you would do all day.
*The thirteen-year-old boy and the four-star general. They’re hard to tell apart.
†The U.S. military has a “central command” in Tampa. What goes on there is best left to the imagination, though I suspect that what the imagination can conceive would fall far short of the facts.
