Everybody, please chip in. We've already made it to 101 pages of letters; with a little more effort, we can surpass the next digital milestone with 1,000 letter on this opinion piece.

To make it easy, here are your templates. For Clinton supporters:

"Obama worshipers make me want to puke. Obama is nothing but an inflated ego swirling inside the noxious gas of his own rhetoric. Hope and change, my ass. Give me some real leadership with proven credentials, and all you Obamamaniacs out there, go ahead and drink the Leader's Koolaid. Insubstantial fluff, inflated rhetoric, useless 'charisma' -- feh."

For Obama supporters:

"Clintonites make me sick. On and on about 'experience' and 'leadership' -- leadership in what, I'd like to know? All Hillary has ever led is the DLC's drive to turn the Democratic Party into Republican Lite. Hillary's hypocrisy, lies, inflated resume, sense of entitlement, and desperate desire to win at all costs are going to turn voters to McCain."

For Republican trolls:

"Hillary's a desperate, lying bitch and Obama's the second coming of Jesse Jackson. We're going to wipe the floor with you in November, right after our glorious Surge sweeps democracy across the face of the Moslem world, by Jingo!"

For everyone else:

"You partisan hacks disgust me. Hillary this, Obama that -- why don't you all crawl back under the rocks you slithered out from and leave us alone?"

Repeat endlessly until we hit 1,000.

In the run-up to the war, critics pointed out that it would inevitably be a long, bloody, destructive, and expensive enterprise. War promoters countered by denying all four points. It would not be bloody and destructive; we would be welcomed as liberators. It would not be a long war, but would be over in less than six months. Most important to the tax-cutting Bush administration, it would not cost American taxpayers anything; we would fight the war with no more than 100,000 troops and fund it with Iraq's own oil revenues.

The Surge is an admission of failure on all points. It is an admission that we cannot come close to anything resembling "victory" (no matter how ill-defined) without substantially more troops than were used to launch the war five years ago. It is an admission that the war is and will continue to be infinitely more expensive than the cost-free conflict we were promised. It is an admission that bodies, lives, and property will continue to be sacrificed in the name of the war. And it is an admission that there is no endgame; no conclusion to the war is foreseen or foreseeable; far from ending in six months (September 2003?), the conflict will stretch into the unknown distance.

How can this be spun as a good thing for supporters of the unending war?

I don't see how any honest person could possibly deny the overt, leering, hate-filled sexism that fills and informs so much of the anti-Clinton rhetoric we've all been forced to hear over the past several months. If Hillary-haters cannot admit that, shame on them.

By the same token, I do wish that certain Clinton supporters could try just supporting her without feeling they have to hate Obama and all of his supporters. Like the Ron Paulistas of a few months ago, I suspect they are much more vocal (especially in the letters pages of Salon) than they are numerous, but it is still a pity to see hate countered with more hate.

McCain concluded, "I believe we can grow this economy, and reduce this deficit.'' This is so utterly foolish, it's hard to believe a serious presidential candidate would be willing to say it out loud.

If a friend of yours said this (or an economics professor, or a student), you could justifiably call it foolish. But McCain is a presidential candidate, and here he's just parroting what his base believes with unshakable faith. If he believes it himself, then he's foolish too, but pandering to the base is just how politics is done in the USA.