The WORD Blog

If this writer had been thinking clearly, he would have known that there would have to be a Part 2. And maybe even a 3. Braggadocio definitely on center stage but there is more. Tomorrow, Sunday, CNN’s Reliable Sources, will feature some  pundits talking about the McChrystal affair. I can’ wait to see it.

However, I still like what I wrote in Part 1, that the General’s mooning of the Obama administration was contempt expressed in act of desperation. Regardless of what others have, might or will say. And I especially like this excerpt from Frank Rich of the New York Times:

There were few laughs in the 36 hours of tumult, but Jon Stewart captured them with a montage of cable-news talking heads expressing repeated shock that an interloper from a rock ’n’ roll magazine could gain access to the war command and induce it to speak with self-immolating candor. Politico theorized that Hastings had pulled off his impertinent coup because he was a freelance journalist rather than a beat reporter, and so could risk “burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.”

That sentence was edited out of the article — in a routine updating, said Politico — after the blogger Andrew Sullivan highlighted it as a devastating indictment of a Washington media elite too cozy with and protective of its sources to report the unvarnished news.

Love it.

Full Rich Op Ed – The 36 Hours That Shook Washington – here.