Obama Launches the Untouchable Hagel Defense

In a sign of his full-on awareness of the wave of criticism already trailing former Senator Chuck Hagel, President Obama nominated his next Secretary of Defense with a simple defense Monday afternoon: Hagel's top qualification? He's a Vietnam vet. Hagel would be the first former enlisted man to serve as defense secretary, so "Chuck knows that war is not an abstraction," Obama said. "In Chuck ...