NBC's Brian Williams covered President Obama's smackdown speech in the Rose Garden yesterday calling the McChrystal affair "a crisis" to add to the crisis in the Gulf.  Absurd. There is no comparison. High level flaps happen all the time, and they don't decimate the landscape.

This leads us to conjecture about the hidden agenda of the mainstream press and Rolling Stone Magazine.  The way the mainstream media spun the remarks of McChrystal's team has some in the blogosphere speculating that the Left set out to smear the general and cause him to lose his job.

Details are scant about who said what to whom, and how the magazine got access to the highest command unit in Afghanistan. Here's a post from Larry Johnson's blog, No Quarter:

This was a set up of General McChrystal. While I'm not a personal friend, I worked under his command for several years and know that he frowned on sharing anything with the media. In fact, I'm certain he did not invite the Rolling Stone reporter into his lair.

[snip]

Here's what I think happened. Rolling Stone asked someone at the White House or DOD for permission to do a piece on the counter insurgency progress in Afghanistan. McChrystal was told to let the reporter accompany them. He thought that the piece being done was on the counter insurgency. Boy, was he wrong.