The Privileges of Rank 0
Dick Polman, citing Aldous Huxley, points out that “some animals are more equal than others.”
Imagine, for the sake of argument, that you or I had a sensitive government job. If you or I were brazen enough to lie to the FBI – if we told the feds, for instance, that we hadn’t shared highly classified material with unauthorized people when in truth we had done it – we’d surely be ticketed for jail. Because lying to the FBI, and sharing highly classified material with unauthorized people, are big-time felonies.
But if you’re David Petraeus – former Army general and bipartisan demigod – and you’ve done those very things, you get a slap on the wrist and a punched ticket to rehabilitation. This is manifestly unfair to the people who have been prosecuted and jailed by the Obama administration for doing arguably less than what Petraeus did, but, hey, Orwell covered that ground in his farm fable 70 years ago.
It doesn’t get much ranker than this, now, does it?
