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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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George Will apparently doesn't think that those receiving unemployment benefits spend their checks because he claims that another extension would not stimulate the economy. Another typical mean spirited Republican basically telling unemployed Americans "let them eat cake". I'm sure George thinks that once you cut those benefits off all of those lazy unemployed people will finally have to get off of their butts and magically find those non-existent jobs out there that they weren't looking for before instead of living high off the hog from the riches they were receiving with those massive unemployment checks. Heaven forbid we can't have anyone sucking off of that government teat when we've got those tax cuts for the rich we've got to keep in place and those wars to pay for.

I assume George won't have to worry about actually being around any of those tiresome whiners from his perch at his $1.9 million mansion in Chevy Chase, Md. since they probably keep that type of riff-raff out of his neighborhood.

And Rajiv Chandrasekaran nonsense about who's playing politics with this is almost as bad. Other than Ben Nelson it's not the Democrats blocking unemployment benefits. If the Republicans get whacked with this in November, they deserve it.

SANGER: And the president's also in the position in Canada of saying, don't do as I do, do as I say. I mean, just the day before he left, Congress could not come to an agreement on a very small extension of unemployment benefits, the most basic stimulus effort that the president tried to push.

TAPPER: 1.2 million Americans are going to lose their unemployment benefit extensions -- or unemployment benefits this week.

SANGER: That's right. So there's a fundamental stimulus action and the president had to go up and tell the Europeans they weren't doing enough for stimulus.

TAPPER: George, why can't they pass this unemployment extension? I don't understand. The Republicans say spending cuts should pay for this, the Democrats know it's emergency spending. It seems like this is something where there could be a compromise.

WILL: Well, partly because they believe that when you subsidize something, you get more of it. And we're subsidizing unemployment, that is the long-term unemployment, those unemployed more than six months, is it at an all-time high and they do not think it's stimulative because what stimulates is the consumer and savers' sense of permanent income. And everyone knows that unemployment benefits are not permanent income.

TAPPER: Rajiv, I'm going to let you have the last word, we only have a minute left.

CHANDRASEKARAN: Both sides in this town have an incentive to let this drag out longer. The Republicans certainly playing to their base don't want to be seen as adding to the debt issues in a midterm election year. The Democrats I think are trying to sort of push the Republicans and trying to make them look like the party that's denying 1.2 million people an extension of these benefits.

Transcript via ABC News.

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The panel discussion from this week's Real Time with Bill Maher on the media's constant quest for false balance and pretending there are always two equally valid sides to every issue. This is something that any of us who monitor the cable news daily nonsense already know but it was nice to hear some of these things said aloud for once.

Too many of the talking heads on television are nothing but out of work political consultants. They want a left and right person to battle it out for ratings instead of bringing in people who are actually knowledgeable on a subject. They give cranks equal weight in a debate when they deserve to be dismissed rather than given air time, and they confuse balance for accuracy.

The media has done their best to dumb down the American electorate which unfortunately doesn't always need any help in that department, and as Bill points out, sadly they're doing a good job.