Anybody have any thoughts on Gen. Stanley McChrystal?

On first glance, the dude seems like a gen-yoo-wine ass-kicking samurai cross-bred with the kind of political general who has the shrunken yellow heart of a REMF but likes to dress up as G.I. Joe. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to fight him, but neither would I care to follow him into anything more dangerous than a briefing room.

A casual Google doesn’t turn up much in the way of a real combat record, and the much-hyped Rolling Stone story sure doesn’t answer many questions. It paints him as some class of Zen archer, if Zen archers also happened to be egomaniacs. Col. Walter E. Kurtz comes to mind, as does Julius Caesar. Maybe George Armstrong Custer.

My shoot-from-the-hip observation is that he’s another one of these ivory-tower dudes who has a theory he’d like to prove if you don’t mind contributing a few of your friends, neighbors and family members to the experiment.

Must be fun to be in the White House right about now, eh? Can him or keep him, it’s gonna be nothing but incoming.

• Late update: The Los Angeles Times has failed to distinguish itself on many occasions in recent years, but this aside in a straight news story about the McChrystal contretemps that should display no bias is particularly appalling:

Obama, who has not served in the military, has sought to solidify his status as commander in chief through frequent appearances with troops. Such appearances have sought to convey that he has the confidence of the American military.

Uh huh. No wonder these cocksuckers declined to hire me as a copy editor back in the Eighties, ’cause I would’ve folded that paragraph into a conical shape and shoved it up someone’s ass.

Well, dipshits, like it or not, he is the CINC, and you don’t have to go back very far to find CINCs who liked to be photographed hanging around with the grunts, feeding them plastic turkeys. Let’s hope that this one is less eager to feed them into the meat grinder.