Retired Army Major General John Batiste — recently cashiered as an official CBS News expert after appearing in a partisan political commercial for “Vote Vets”

was invited on to ABC’s Good Morning America Wednesday morning. Substitute host George Stephanopoulos played the skeptic about a hasty pullout from Iraq, but the general sounded almost like an official spokesman for Senate Democrats: “I had the opportunity yesterday to read the Levin-Reid amendment in the Senate, two pages carefully crafted that makes incredible sense. That is, we need a better plan to get out than what we had to get in. We need to recognize that our all-volunteer military cannot sustain the current cycle of deployments. And this ought to really worry every American.” The general has been willing to go just about anywhere on the left – including radical Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now show – to pound his podium against President Bush.