With thanks to Cousin Aaron, I bring you the news that Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone, the professional military gadfly and all-around speaker of truth to power, hit a new low yesterday.  At a Congressional Progressive Caucus Peace and Security Task Force briefing, Hastings lit into General David Petraeus, accusing him of employing the “Charlie Sheen strategy:”

General Petraeus is giving us the Charlie Sheen counter-insurgency strategy, which is to give exclusive interviews to every major network, and to keep saying ‘we’re winning’ and hope the public actually agrees with you.

Now Hastings is well-known for his distaste for accomplished, aggressive war fighters so his comparison between a four-star general on his fourth combat tour of the global war on terror and a TV sit-com actor with unfortunate substance abuse and domestic violence issues comes as no surprise.  What is noteworthy is that this outburst came at a Congressional briefing, and that any member of the U.S. House of Representatives sat through it–let alone approved, as Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.)  did, having apparently learned nothing from the “General Betray Us” debacle. 

No one is telling Ms. Woolsey that she needs to support administration policy on Afghanistan, but it would be seemly to keep these slurs against our military out of the halls of Congress–even if the event did take place in a “closet” as she claimed in her prepared remarks (score one for Chairman Issa and the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform for bumping them into it!).  Just out of curiosity, who paid for this “briefing?” Was it a taxpayer-funded closet she found so oppressive?  I think we just might have a candidate for a budget cut.