[On presidential candidates not condemning the controversial MoveOn.org ad in The New York Times.] If you're not tough enough to repudiate a scurrilo… - John McCain

As part of Social Security reform, I believe that private savings accounts are a part of it -- along the lines that President Bush proposed.

Many families could not and should not have been expected to abandon hope that their sons, husbands, and brothers who had disappeared in the jungles of Vietnam might yet be returned to them. And many good people, who shared their hope and had come to their assistance, were motivated by the most admirable of intentions, to keep faith with Americans who had done all that duty asked of them. But these good intentions and understandable emotions also drew the attention of people with less honorable purposes. There came to exist in America, and elsewhere in the years that followed the Vietnam War, a small cottage industry made up of swindlers, dime-store Rambos, and just plain old conspiracy nuts who preyed on the emotions of the families and on the attention of officials who were dedicated to the search for our missing. They had helped convince many of the families and a few members of Congress that the US. government had knowingly abandoned American servicemen in Vietnam and that five successive presidential administrations had covered up the crime. It was among the most damaging and most hurtful of all the lies about the Vietnam War that I ever encountered.

Our military is being forced to confront these growing threats with shrinking resources. This year's defense budget is more than $150 billion less than fiscal year 2011. Despite periodic relief from the budget caps that imposed these cuts, including the Bipartisan Budget Act of last year, each of our military services remains underfunded, undersized, and unready to meet current and future threats. In short, as threats grow and the operational demands on our military increase, defense spending in constant dollars is decreasing. How does that make any sense? The President's defense budget request strictly adheres to the bipartisan budget agreement, which is $17 billion less than what the Department of Defense planned for last year. As a result, the military services' underfunded requirements total nearly $23 billion for the coming fiscal year alone. Meanwhile, sequestration threatens to return in 2018, taking away another $100 billion from our military through 2021. This is unacceptable.