but, look, brian, i just did a long interview with james kitfield who did a piece on mike flynn that was pretty balanced, pretty in-depth. a couple observations. first of all, flynn is the best intelligence officer of his generation. he and general stanley mcchrystal and david petraeus dozen 9/11s sin then, they ve been relentless in confronting the global jihadist community. so he s a good guy. he s objective, he s informed, he s tough. surprised he s going to be the national security advisor. i think he ll probably be pretty good at it although there s a cautionary note here. national security is not just the military, it s department of homeland security, it s treasury, energy, attorney general. broader scope in some ways than he s operated in. do you worry at all about this kind of game of footsie
rhetoric we just heard and what do you think about his chance miss this job? well, you know that video is makes most of us in the military very uncomfortable. but, look, brian, i just did a long interview with james kitfield who did a piece on mike flynn that was pretty balanced, pretty in-depth. a couple observations. first of all, flynn is the best intelligence officer of his generation. he and general stanley mcchrystal and david petraeus are the reason we haven t had a dozen 9/11s sin then, they ve been relentless in confronting the global jihadist community. so he s a good guy. he s objective, he s informed, he s tough. he does his home work, i m not surprised he s going to be the national security advisor. i think he ll probably be pretty good at it although there s a cautionary note here.
grow around david tpetraeus as his successor general john allen is now linked to the controversy or at least linked to some of the players. let s bring in our panel, political director for the grio.com, and columnist with bloomberg view, and stephanie is the president of emily s list and i also have james from the national journal who is out with a brand-new piece on this entire episode. so, james, i want to start with you because i thought this was a very striking you sort of write about trying to write about this from 30,000 feet, the impact on national security. this is what you write, no one is condoning what petraeus did, but there are a lot of self-righteous people holding him to a standard that not many people could meet without considering what he sacrificed because of the years of separation from his spouse and family, said one army general. there s a lack of proportionality between the crime and the reaction. we are suddenly treating like a leper an incredibly talented in
i don t think there s a culture. we haven t gotten to the bottom of this case. it s much more than coincidence the same people are involved, so there is something going on here. it s obviously going to be investigated and rightfully so. but i don t think they think they have impunity but are under really extraordinary circumstances and those circumstances might lend themselves in some cases to affairs and things like this. how concerned are you, would you be about morale? you know, mildly concerned. as i said in my piece, this rang ls with a lot of people who understood petraeus was really an extraordinary leader, that he had skills and talents that just don t come around every day. probably the best strategic thinker of his generation of office officers. so we lost somebody who was very, very valuable in this continuing fight. and so i think people just feel very sad about that. james kitfield, national journal s outstanding reporter on defense and military issues.
baldwin running for the united states senate and no one thought she could win. no one thought she could win even until the day the votes were being counted they didn t think she could win. she had to prove herself beyond it. and i think that s part of why we don t see these types of things with women leaders. is this the media s fault? how much are we playing a role in this? is. i don t think we are in this case. he was asked to resign. that s where it came from. it s us judging him as much anticipating perhaps the case. how the feed iing frenzy arod stories like had develop. that s true. it s also the cia director. this is different than a senator having an affair. the cia director more liable to blackmail. james, i have to ask this, we have two generals now, general allen, general petraeus, is this coincidence, two generals caught up in something like this or is there a culture here among the top commanders if they can get away with anything?