Both/And

Doyle McManus, card-carrying member of your liberal media. doing some "news analysis" for The Los Angeles Times. points out that if you vote for Democrats, terrorists will kill your children:

Although fireworks erupted last week among the leading Democratic candidates, those differences are narrow compared with the chasm between the two parties' worldviews, one focused on battling the threat of radical Islam, the other on ending the war.

The point, of course, is that ending the war in Iraq isn't something contrary to improving the country's ability to reduce its vulnerability to terrorism, nor is it something other than improving the country's ability to reduce its vulnerability to terrorism, rather, it's a constitutive part of improving the country's ability to reduce its vulnerability to terrorism. If someone had given me a bunch of money to start a Democratic-oriented national security think tank and an LA Times writer had called me up to discuss this issue, that's the point I would have made. Instead, the powers that be decided that Kurt Campbell should start a think tank instead:

Foreign policy is playing a role in this campaign unlike any election since the Cold War," said Kurt Campbell, a former Clinton administration official who heads a new centrist think tank in Washington, the Center for New American Security. "The debate so far has made the two parties' positions appear polarized, more than they need to be…. The election may well be decided on foreign policy and national security, but it's all about just two issues: Iraq and the war on terror."

Very Serious!