The Rolling Stone issue with Michael Hastings' hot Afghanistan article also has a naked Lady GaGa on the cover.

The article that everyone is talking about, “The Runaway General” by Michael Hastings, won’t even be on newsstands until Friday. The piece, a profile of Stanley A. McChrystal, went live on the Rolling Stone website Tuesday, but by then it was already the talk of the town — Washington, especially — after being leaked to a number of interested parties by Rolling Stone itself. And then the piece got the biggest response of all: Obama forced McChrystal to Washington on Wednesday to explain his comments to the magazine and then, after getting that explanation, fired him.

Even before McChrystal’s firing, Hastings, a former Newsweek reporter, was shocked by the response to his piece. In an interview he said “We end up ignoring Afghanistan, so I’m quite surprised it’s creating such a stir. I knew I had some decent material to work with, but I’m surprised at the level of involvement.” In the days since, Hastings’ surprise has surely deepened, but his role in McChrystal’s sacking seems to have made him ambivalent about the entire situation, if his most recent two pieces (here and here) are any indication.

Commentators online have compared the swift reaction to another great Rolling Stone scoop: Carl Bernstein‘s 1977 revelation that hundreds of American journalists had been working for the Central Intelligence Agency, which led to congressional hearings in 1978. But the case of the McChrystal scoop seems somehow different: after all, the General was fired before the essay was even on stands. There’s even a debate ongoing about the how the piece was published online: it seems a number of mainstream news outlets (Time and Politico) ran the piece early and illegally–that is, before Rolling Stone had made the decision to publish online. The media, it seems, couldn’t wait until there was a legitimate version of the story to link to. And then there’s speed of the Administration’s reaction to the story, which is remarkable, even in the age of the Internet.