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Tara McKelvey, who writes about national security for Newsweek and The Daily Beast, told CNN on Sunday that former CIA Director David Petraeus flirted with both men in women in the media to get favorable press coverage.

Following his resignation earlier this month, McKelvey recalled her experience with Petraeus and his mistress, Paula Broadwell, in a piece for the The Atlantic.

"Like many successful people in Washington, Petraeus was a flirt, with both men and women," she wrote. "Ebullient, energetic, even bubbly, he had cultivated relationships with male journalists for years, selling them on controversial programs such as counterinsurgency, as well as on his own 'super-human, perfect-warrior image,' as one military officer puts it. ... In short, Petraeus was good at his job, as a military man, as head of the CIA, and as director of a media charm campaign in Washington."

The Washington Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran explained to Kurtz on Sunday that the access Petraeus provided "could be intoxicating for journalists."

"You get to zip around the battlefield on a Black Hawk helicopter popping into frontline bases, it's a thrill traveling with a four star [general]," Chandrasekaran said, adding that "Petraeus was an assiduous emailer."

"At one point it did sort of prompt a thought in my head, 'Boy, don't you have a war to run here?'"

"He was really fun to be around," McKelvey agreed. "I met him at a party and he was just a lot of fun to talk to and I can see how intoxicating it would be. ... He was a total flirt, both with men and with women. You know, people respond to it. They like to be flattered and he was good at it."

McKelvey had also noted that "classified information is used as a pickup line" in Washington, but would not give Kurtz any specifics.

"I really can't reveal anything more than that," she chuckled.

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From this Wednesday night's The Young Turks, our own Richard Eskow joined host Cenk Uygur, Turk's regular Ben Mankiewicz and Third Way's Jill Pike to discuss Newt Gingrich's resurgence in the polls on the South Carolina Republican primary race and Andrew Sullivan's recent article at Newsweek where he went after critics of President Obama.

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After Tina Brown's Newsweek gave 1000 Americans a U.S. citizenship test in which 38 percent failed outright, Bill Maher and the crew at Real Time came up with a new one of their own that they thought most Americans could actually pass.

You can read the article at Newsweek here -- How Dumb Are We?

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The Chris Matthews show decided to take "a look back at the moments in TV and politics which changed American history, the good, the bad and the unforgettable". Apparently during that discussion Tweety forgot about his fawning over George Bush's "Mission Accomplished" Top Gun moment and calls it "another time when TV images really hurt".

Mrs. Greenspan makes this excuse for the Villagers.

Mitchell: But it worked initially.

Matthews: Yeah.

Mitchell: At the time it was, everyone, including all of the media were caught up...

Matthews: I thought...

Mitchell: ...in the successful choreography by the Bush White House. It was only later during 2006 when the war was going so badly that it was different in retrospect.

Fineman: It's an example of be careful what you wish for because we were all captivated by that image. The Newsweek cover was Top Gun, so that felt good to Bush at the time but it ended up having the opposite reaction later.

Matthews. Wow.

Yeah...wow. Yeah wow how completely disingenuous of you to pretend this didn't happen. From Digby who vowed to never let Tweety forget his fawning over Bush's Top Gun moment, I'm more than happy to give a little help in that department. Here's her wonderful post from back in 2004.

Speaking Of Unseemly Bulges:

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After seeing Newsweek's article on Liz Cheney, Palin With A Pedigree, Bill Maher offers her some help with campaign banners for her potential Presidential run in 2012.

(Warning, not safe for work.)

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Steve Doocy and his cohorts at Fox & Friends make Ed Schultz's Psycho Talk segment for this -- Doocy: ‘Makes sense’ to give people same care as dogs:

Fox & Friends on Friday may have finally offered up the alternative to "ObamaCare" that Republicans and other health reform opponents haven't stepped up with.

The solution? Treat patients as if they were pets.

To be fair, it wasn't the Fox show hosts' idea. It came from a Newsweek article by veterinary oncologist Karen Oberthaler, who offers an idea for reducing health care costs. She says modeling treatment for humans after veterinary clinics could reduce the use of wasteful and often unnecessary tests.

"A very brilliant veterinary oncologist has a suggestion. She says we should treat people like they treat their dogs," guest host Dari Alexander said.

"Which makes a lot of sense," host Steve Doocy responded, to a few guffaws from his co-hosts.

Read on...

And as Ed noted, they moved on to death panels from there. Heaven forbid anyone on Fox would ever pass up another opportunity to scare the hell out of their viewers.

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Howard Kurtz asks his panel of the editor of The New York Times Week in Review and The New York Times Book Review Sam Tanenhaus, the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody and the Washington Post's Ceci Connolly what they think of the right wing's preemptive freak out over President Obama's speech to school children last week.

Tanenhaus says it is an indication of what he calls "the death of conservatism" which is the theme and name of his book.

Brody thinks the President has a "perception problem". Hmmmm.... I wonder what might have contributed to that. The media overplaying the right wing screechers that should otherwise be dismissed couldn't have possibly contributed to that, could it David?

And Ceci Connolly says the "media are addicted to conflict". And don't blame them for feeding us crap on a daily basis since that 24 hour news cycle is so hard to fill up. Well here's a thought. Why not fill it with something besides crap? Somehow Amy Goodman manages to find an hours worth of news every day that you guys can't find the time to report on in that 24 hour cycle. Imagine that. I would imagine that a good deal of our readers here at Crooks and Liars could recommend more stories that are worth reporting on than there would be time for in the 24 hour news cycle, even on a "slow day".

I'd like to think that Sam Tanenhaus' observation is the correct one and that this over the top rhetoric does mean the death of the conservative movement, but our "mainstream media" along with a lot of other powerful forces are going to do their best to make sure it doesn't happen any time soon.

Transcript below the fold.

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Rachel Maddow talks to Michael Isikoff about his latest article in Newsweek, Torture Report Could Spell Big Trouble for Bush Lawyers.

An internal Justice Department report on the conduct of senior lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics is causing anxiety among former Bush administration officials. H. Marshall Jarrett, chief of the department's ethics watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), confirmed last year he was investigating whether the legal advice in crucial interrogation memos "was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys." According to two knowledgeable sources who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters, a draft of the report was submitted in the final weeks of the Bush administration. It sharply criticized the legal work of two former top officials—Jay Bybee and John Yoo—as well as that of Steven Bradbury, who was chief of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the time the report was submitted, the sources said. (Bybee, Yoo and Bradbury did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

But then–Attorney General Michael Mukasey and his deputy, Mark Filip, strongly objected to the draft, according to the sources. Filip wanted the report to include responses from all three principals, said one of the sources, a former top Bush administration lawyer. (Mukasey could not be reached; his former chief of staff did not respond to requests for comment. Filip also did not return a phone message.) OPR is now seeking to include the responses before a final version is presented to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. "The matter is under review," said Justice spokesman Matthew Miller.

If Holder accepts the OPR findings, the report could be forwarded to state bar associations for possible disciplinary action. But some former Bush officials are furious about the OPR's initial findings and question the premise of the probe. "OPR is not competent to judge [the opinions by Justice attorneys]. They're not constitutional scholars," said the former Bush lawyer. Mukasey, in speeches before he left, decried the second-guessing of Justice lawyers who, acting under "almost unimaginable pressure" after 9/11, offered "their best judgment of what the law required."

You can read the rest of the article here as linked above: Torture Report Could Spell Big Trouble for Bush Lawyers.