maturity being a factor here. general gibbs said one of the questions that ought to weigh heavily on the mind of the president and the family of those military personnel waging this battle day in and day out in afghanistan is whether the current military leadership has the capability and maturity to carry out the mission. given the opportunity to say general mcchrystal was capable and mature enough to lead this operation, refused to do so. his maturity and capability openly questioned by this white house. shepard: did they have an idea if this was coming or last night the presentation of this article was it it a bombshell and how did he react exactly. blind sighted. robert gibbs told us in the briefing today he walked the article over to the president in the residence last night. the president had some vegas knowledge that he said something the president wouldn t like. he read the article and returned to the oval office twice last evening and placing phone calls to his chief of s
army needs to do in the future they need to take a close look at just how long these deployments are and how long on the every single day on these deployments is a battle day. combat day. and to string them along, deployment after deployment after deployment as a long run debilitating effect on soldiers. however, the political favorability of redeploying the same soldier four, five, six times instead of having to do a draft which would create much more attention on why are we at war, what are we doing in the war, what s the plan for the war? you avoid all those questions by taking a very small group of young men primarily and recycling them into this war zone while telling the balance of the country to ignore it. well, these are the tradeoffs that we made. politically. and there is a very famous piece of graffiti that says all through iraq and afghanistan, it says america is not at war. the army or the marines are at war. america is at the mall. that s absolutely true. there is
we will keep pressing. the fbi will keep pressing senator whitehouse. joe johns, thank you so much. the white house and paul ryan have a math problem, mainly subtraction. the republican plan to repeal and replace obamacare, it appears to be losing votes from across the spectrum of the republican party. cnn s suzanne malveaux on capitol hill right now. there are some republicans who flat out don t even want to talk about this. reporter: no, they don t. this is a big battle day for republican reform and the republican bill on both sides. democrats as well as republicans. we ll start on the republican side on the senate, conservatives holding a 1:00 p.m. rally. we re talking about rand paul and senators ted cruz pushing that this is not actually hard enough. they have to make greater, more drastic changes here. they re calling it obamacare light and they re squeezing moderate republican peeling the squeeze saying this is a damaging cbo score.