Petraeus: The Paris Hilton of Generals

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on September 12, 2007, Printed on September 12, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/62302/

The former Cockney flower-girl turned elegant-English-speaker Eliza Doolittle caught something of our moment in these lyrics from My Fair Lady: "Oh, words, words, words, I'm so sick of words .... Is that all you blighters can do?"

Of course, all she had to do was be Pygmalion to a self-involved language teacher. We've had to bear with the bloviating of almost every member of Congress, the full-blast PR apparatus of the White House, and two endless days of congressional testimony from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, not to speak of the flood of newspaper, radio, and TV stories about all of the above and the bevy of experts who are hustled out to do the horse-race assessments of how the general and ambassador performed, whether they "bought" time for the President, and the like.