The office I work with contains several liberals, a few conservatives and a social anarchist, so this was quite the discussion yesterday. I think I hit a lot of these points and got across to them the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" doesn't just apply to schedulers of womens' OB/gyn appointments, but to the POTUS. The thing that floors me is that McChrystal had PRIOR DOCUMENTATION of what a embedded reporter could do power-wise with Generation Kill, and he's at a higher level of command.

As my military father put it - "You chose this job and you do your fucking job. You don't bitch about it to anyone but the people who can change it and even then you don't bitch - you sell something better."

McChrystal is the scapegoat, the easy item to talk about rather than the stuff that truly needs to be addressed. People are dying for this. The military is sold on the "do it for your country" which means their tenet is that they're dying for us. If the top command can't fucking sell that, then something else of greater import is really really wrong.