Revelations that now-former CIA director David Petraeus had an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, have pulled into focus how the press reveres America’s highest-ranked military generals. Not only does the affair itself show the folly of someone allowing his or her self to become too embedded with any one military officer but it also shows what happens when the media builds up a figure like Petraeus and then is given reason to be disappointed.

The press can barely come to grips with the fact that America has “lost” someone widely considered to be a role model for leadership among establishment journalists

Most liberals in the United States seem to prefer ignoring what is happening with WikiLeaks, particularly its founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange. Either they are totally repulsed by Assange as an individual, they do not consider WikiLeaks to have provided a valuable service by releasing previously classified documents, the way the United States government is pursuing WikiLeaks founders, owners, managers, staffers and others connected doesn’t bother them or the story at this point is so complicated that they do not have the patience to sort out all the details to figure out the truth.

These various viewpoints inevitably lead to a contention that the era of WikiLeaks is over and, perhaps, the organization never really mattered that much at all.

General Stanley McChrystal told journalist Michael Hastings that he wanted to be on the cover of Rolling Stone and so he was. The resulting story—describing an alcohol fueled dinner in Paris and the General’s staff mocking the Obama Administration—ended McChrystal’s tour as the commander of US forces in Afghanistan and his military career.

Little Davey P is busy lying to the people in Washington again. This morning, Nice Mike Hastings had a very interesting article at Rolling Stone. He described how Bad Billy C and Screaming Greg B made Lt. Col. Holmes do mind tricks on important Washington people who were visiting Afghanistan. Mr. Jim explained it all right here and told us how Bad Billy C was probably doing this because Little Davey P wanted him to.

But now, Little Davey P is acting like he had nothing to do with the mind tricks and is calling for Bad Billy C to be investigated.

Caldwell wanted to use a small part of the resources the Congress provided him, a $6 million psy-ops team, on Congress to in turn convince Congress to provide him with even more resources. While outrageous, this is basically just a very small scale version of how defense contractors in the military-industrial complex use political donations in the expanding growth spiral.

Building on the success of his “The Runaway General” article that led to President Obama firing Stanley McChrystal, Michael Hastings returns to the pages of Rolling Stone with “Another Runaway General“, where he exposes information operations, or Psy-Ops, on dignitaries including US Senators as they visited Afghanistan on “fact-finding” trips. What should not be missed when contemplating the illegal and immoral aspects of this information operation directed against the citizens of the country and high level government officials is that it is just one more instance in an ongoing pattern of information manipulation and outright deception on the part of the military in recent years. A few recent examples include the use of retired generals posing as independent military analysts to spout information coordinated by the Pentagon, intentional deception to cover up Special Operations troops digging bullets out of the bodies of pregnant women they killed in a night raid and the more recent claim by General Petraeus that parents intentionally burned their children in order to exaggerate injuries received in a US attack, to name just a few.

Tuesday, Philip Shenon reported that Wikileaks wanted the Defense Department’s help reviewing the next batch of documents it will release for names that should be redacted.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has told the Huffington Post she expects a “serious drawdown” of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in the summer of 2011. The House Rules Committee has now approved an amendment for consideration on the war supplemental that will allow Speaker Pelosi to “put her money where her mouth is.”

Lost in the self-righteous scrum of negative opinion concerning Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s mouthing off to “Rolling Stone” was the fact that this was a very good day for freedom of the press.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s apology for his recent too-candid interview with Rolling Stone magazine — emailed to me and other reporters well before the Rolling Stone story dropped — suggests that he wasn’t trying to walk away from his command in a blaze of arrogance. But it’s on him to repair his relationship with his colleagues and his bosses.