Opinion (Michael McCord): War shoutfest bound to get nastier

Courtesy of a reader's harsh appraisal of my patriotic fitness, I feel like a charter member of the surrender monkey club. I'm in the same cowardly tree with such luminaries as former Secretary of State James Baker and former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton, whose mostly tepid and outdated Iraq Study Group proposals were vilified by those humorous folks at the New York Post -- the statesmen were adorned in monkey suits on the front page and dismissed as though, and this was the lowest blow of all, they were French.

I usually don't react to tough criticisms or even questions about my sanity or patriotism. But I believe it was an instructive prelude of hits to come as the fantasies about what this war is truly about and the war being truly lost explode into a shower of sullen reaction.

Just watch President Bush as he displays his very public recital of the Kubler-Ross formula for dealing with death and dying. In this case, Bush has been forced into an unimaginable quandary of his own making -- a war of choice seemingly won with ease (remember "Mission Accomplished" in May 2003?), a war he proclaimed to be the central front of the war on terror has turned into an existential black hole.

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