What are the chances that the media hyperfocus on this is part of a concerted effort to prepare the people for a very severe program of military cutbacks?

Signs point to No. The cutbacks in the military are at least a couple months away, Petraeus will be long forgotten by then.

 

The popular consensus is this is a legal trick by the Obama administration to keep him from having to testify before Congress later this week about the attack on the US embassy in Libya. As a government official he is required by law to appear and testify before Congressional committees when summoned. As a civilian he has to be subpoenaed, has access to the courts to fight it, and can invoke his constitutional rights to avoid testifying, or even lie if not under oath.

This is becoming truely bizare (starts about 1/3rd the way down the page): http://online.wsj.com/article/... 

 

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The David Petraeus sex scandal turns out to have more twists than a pretzel factory, to borrow a phrase from a former journalist.... It came to light when a Florida woman started receiving threatening emails from an unknown source, who turned out to be the CIA director's biographer. The Florida woman went to an FBI agent, from whom, The Wall Street Journal... reports, she had previously received shirtless photos. The shirtless FBI agent got the ball rolling on the investigation, which uncovered the affair between the CIA director and the biographer.

 

Meanwhile, the Washington Post... reports, the Florida woman was also receiving "between 20,000 and 30,000 pages of documents--most of them e-mails--that contain 'potentially inappropriate' communication" from the Marine general who serves as the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. To be sure, there could be an innocent explanation. Maybe they were passing around copies of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

 

CBS News... reports there's also a custody battle in which the CIA director and the Marine general both served as character references for the sister of the woman who received the threatening emails, the shirtless photos and the 20,000 to 30,000 pages of potentially inappropriate communications.

 

In a Washington Post... op-ed, the ghostwriter for the biographer of the CIA director complains that he feels left out, because he never had an inkling that the biographer and the CIA director were having an affair. Other things he didn't know about include the threatening emails, the shirtless photos, the 20,000 to 30,000 pages of potentially inappropriate communications, and the child-custody dispute. "My wife says I'm the most clueless person in America," he writes. We should all be so lucky.

I get the impression you wouldn't believe anyone could ever make all this up.