Russert is an idiot and McCain is a fool.
Our 'kids' do not come out of boot camp ready to fight. They still have a hard year (at least) of intermediate and advanced infantry training, or armor, or artillery, etc, depending on specialty.
Our army has experienced NCO's, Senior NCO's and officers who in total add thousands of years of direct combat experience into the training, combat management and life saving skills that our young soldiers need.
Ignoring that shows a complete misunderstanding about how a military works and completely illustrates why journalists simply cannot fathom why our military is really the best in the world.
Earth to Tim: It's the people!!!! The US military is perfection on Earth due to the hard work of career soldiers who have more concern for the United States in their little fingers than a whole host of fat, biased, hunched-over-frowning-grilling-Republican journalists have in their fat, bloated bodies.
McCain is just a dumb a$$ dufus who, if he thought about what a slanderous thing Russert is saying about our military, would castigate him then and there, but is so eager to blame Rumsfeld, missed his change to prove he learned something as an officer in the Navy.
That is one of the loveliest comments I have ever read here on FR.
On a side note, 40 house republicans are meeting with Jeb Bush, to plead him to run in 2008. Their main argument of Bush fatigue. It cancels with Clinton fatigue. Problem for McCain here is, he asked Mark McCinnon to work on his ad.campaign. He agreed with one condition - if Jeb or Condi run he will go there.
Please send your post to NBC and cc it to Fox, ABC, everybody in the Congress and every newspaper you can find. That is the only way we can get our opinions out. And odds are at most 2 papers may print it. But it is 100% true and it needs to be said to everybody.
Oh my that is beautiful. What a speech that would make! Brought a tear to my eye it did. VERY well done.