When reading the papers, there's this competition of good & bad cousins going on. For every good story I read about anti-Al Qaeda arrests, investigations, etc. (i.e. the real bad guys), there's at least one, if not more, Iraq-related story (truce over, more U.S. soldiers dead, etc.) that manages to crowd-out what should've been the sole-focus stories if not for the occupation-of-Iraq debacle.

Republicans will insist they're all related (one big, fat war on terror), but they're not. One set refers to that group of terrorists (Al Qaeda) actually responsible for 9-11, and the other set of stories refers to the fallout of a preemptive invasion on false pretense. Remember this distinction when perusing through the daily papers....