The GabFest is sponsored by Audible, the Internet's leading provider of spoken audio entertainment.

GabFest listeners can download a free audiobook by signing up for an Audible membership at Audiblepodcast.com slash gabfest.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Political GabFest for Friday, June 25th.

I am David Plotz.

I'm here in Washington with Will Salatan.

John Dickerson is on a secret mission.

I can't tell you where he is because it's secret. Emily Bazelon joins us from New Haven, and I should say that I am losing my voice, so I may well lose my voice in the course of recording this, in which case you guys can just chat, chat, chat, as though I'm not here. David, did you hear that NPR story about the person who sang the lowest note ever? Yes. I thought of you of you. Yes. You know, and I was with my baby as I was listening to that and I just kept on imitating it. I'm not, I don't think I can get quite that low. But you might feel to get close. I'll try with my laryngitis. Today we are going to talk about the sacking of General Stanley McChrystal.

We will talk about some hot Supreme Court cases and the upcoming Kagan confirmation hearings.

And we'll talk about the World Cup and we'll have cocktail chatter.

So let's kick it off.

Will, General McChrystal said some unfortunate things to a Rolling Stone

interviewer, as did some of his aides, was summoned back to Washington from Afghanistan, where he

was the commander, was sacked, and has been replaced by General Petraeus, along with much

gnawing and gnashing and agonizing in the White House about this.

What do you think the impact of this is going to be on the war and on politics?

Well, I was totally surprised, which just shows you how much I know.

I mean, I just thought, okay, it's like a stupid comments.

So a series of stupid comments in this Rolling Stone article. But they're basically

from McChrystal's aides. There's very little that's from McChrystal himself. But it sort of like

gave off this air of the guy is like running chaos down there. It's not like a military operation

and it's not diplomatic. It's none of the things you need to be to run the Afghan operation.

That was essentially the criticism. So I thought that Obama was just going to be Mr.

...