In case you work for a living

Is there an acronym to alert those who are unable to keep up with breaking news because they hold down by a day job? Developments in the story of General Petraeus and Paula Broadwell have reached the point where it has become extremely difficult to keep up. And yet my sense is that we are nowhere near the heart of the matter.

ICYWFAL, here are some stories you may have missed in the past 24 hours:

  • Josh Gerstein reports that the University of Denver removed Paula Broadwell’s keynote speech from YouTube on Monday, but later reposted it. Why would the University of Denver do that? “[W]e were conducting an internal review,” a spokesman for the school explained. I need a translation, but Gerstein stops short of providing one. Incidentally, I tracked down the URL of the reposted video and included it in “All In, Benghazi edition,” where the video remains available for viewing.
  • Broadwell has not spoken publicly since General Petraeus’s resignation this past Friday. The New York Daily News tracked down her father, Paul Krantz, in Bismarck, North Dakota. In a story with four bylines, the Daily News quotes Mr. Krantz: “This is about something else entirely, and the truth will come out. There is a lot more that is going to come out. You wait and see. There’s a lot more here than meets the eye.” Krantz claimed he was not free to elaborate.
  • The Washington Post reports early this morning that the FBI probe that led to the resignation of General Petraeus as DCI has reached General John R. Allen, the commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan: “According to a senior U.S. defense official, the FBI has uncovered between 20,000 and 30,000 documents — most of them e-mails — of ‘potentially inappropriate’ communications.”
  • Yesterday the FBI searched Paula Broadwell’s home in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Washington Post has more here, adding that General Petraeus “did not intend to resign until it became clear that his extramarital affair with Broadwell would become public after the first phase of the FBI investigation of his e-mail accounts.”
  • Vernon Loeb, coauthor (with Broadwell) of All In, the book on General Petraeus, cites his wife’s assessment of him: “My wife says I’m the most clueless person in America.”
  • You may recall that Newsweek was the magazine that spiked Michael Isikoff’s story revealing Bill Clinton’s Lewinsky affair until it was leaked to the Drudge Report. Drudge is of course all over the Broadwell scandal, directing traffic to several of the stories I have noted here. Now comes the Daily Beast, Newsweek’s successor, with a jaunty story on the second woman involved in the Broadwell scandal. The DB reporter asserts: “Whatever the truth in this regard, it remains pitifully ironic that Petraeus could come to such grief over a little sex under a desk in a war zone where thousands of people were and are earnestly seeking to blow other people to bloody bits. Shoot but don’t schtup?” When it comes to humor, the DB guy is no Evelyn Waugh. And he apparently missed the sex under the desk at Langley, but that too would probably just add to the hilarity.
  • Going down a Clintonian byway, ABC News reports: “Broadwell, Lewinsky lawyers at same firm.”
  • The New York Post contributes a story with three bylines that takes up General Petraeus’s interest in the second woman.
  • The Wall Street Journal reports on the FBI agent who took up an interest in the second woman. In case the Journal article is behind a subscriber wall, Busines Insider follows up.
  • James Taranto, call your office. Bloomberg/BusinessWeek explores the question that nobody is asking: “How often do people have sex at the office?”

There is a big dog that hasn’t barked. Where is Bill Clinton when you need him? The man has become the conscience of the Democratic Party. We sorely need his commentary on the scandal so far and I am quite sure that, one way or another, we will have it some time soon.

IIDHTWAL — if I didn’t have to work for a living — I would dig up a few more stories to keep you current and place these stories in order of importance.

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