From their unsubstantiated accusation of a sexual relationship with a lobbyist to Elisabeth Bumiller's pathetic "Why are you so angry?" showing on McCain's campaign plane, the New York Times has been launching broadsides at the man who was once their favorite Republican since he locked up the GOP nomination for President.

On Sunday, the New York Times Magazine will feature a story by Matt Bai entitled "The McCain Doctrines." In the article, Bai mentions the differences of opinion between Sen. John McCain and his fellow Vietnam veterans in the Senate on America's efforts on the Iraqi front of the Global War on Terror, noting that the current and former Senators to whom he spoke -- a group including Chuck Hagel, John Kerry, Max Cleland, Bob Kerrey, Bob Kerrey, Jim Webb, and Chuck Robb -- are all public opponents of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and posits that this may be the result of what Bai calls McCain's "markedly different experience in Vietnam."

McCain "spent the worst and most costly years of the war sealed away, both from the rice paddies of Indochina and from the outside world," writes Bai of the time the Republican spent in a North Vietnamese prison camp in Hanoi, an experience which apparently sheltered him from "the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel."

Bai takes a moment to parenthetically point out that Bob Kerrey "has never believed" this contention; however, the bulk of the print space is reserved for those who will argue that the experiences that made McCain a war hero also make him out of touch with the current war effort.

"I think you learn something fighting on the ground, like me and John Kerry[sic] and Chuck Hagel did in Vietnam," said former Georgia Senator Max Cleland. "This objective of ‘hearts and minds’? Well, hello! You didn’t know which heart and mind was going to blow you up!"

The first page and a half of the eight-page article are overwhelmingly negative about McCain's judgment, and speak against his having learned the fabled "lessons of Vietnam," even saying that:

some suspect that whatever lesson McCain took away from his time in Vietnam, it was not the one that stayed with his colleagues who were “in country” during those years — that some wars simply can’t be won on the battlefield, no matter how long you fight them, no matter how many soldiers you send there to die.

Unfortunately, that beginning portion of the article may leave a bad enough taste in readers' mouths that they do not continue reading the piece -- something which would be a bit of a shame, as the entry is, overall, a very informative and fair account of the development of McCain's foreign policy views.

Then again, for those who do read the entire piece, the last paragraph, which hardly seems to make sense tacked on to the end of what was, by and large, a very good article, will serve as quite a letdown.

Bai concludes:

McCain shrugs this off and insists that he will never waver from his support of the war, no matter what the personal cost. “As I said a year ago,” he told me, “I would rather lose a campaign than a war.” If he doesn’t make the most persuasive argument of his life, he risks losing both.

As I said, the ending is a shame -- and the first page and a half have the feel of a poorly-constructed hit job.

But those other six pages? They may be worth your time. You still have to parse -- it is the NYT, after all -- but there is still s good deal of quality information available in that portion of the article.