Backlash, Part II - The

Backlash, Part II - The more I read, the more convinced I am that the Dems jumped on the Yellowcakes Uranium story too soon, and that before the year is out the punditry will be looking on it as a Dem debacle.

This WSJ piece (via Sullivan), indicates there's a lot less doubt, even inside the Beltway, than skimming the national media would have you believe:

One of the mysteries of the recent yellowcake uranium flap is why the White House has been so defensive about an intelligence judgment that we don't yet know is false, and that the British still insist is true. Our puzzlement is even greater now that we've learned what last October's national intelligence estimate really said.

We're reliably told that that now famous NIE, which is meant to be the best summary judgment of the intelligence community, isn't nearly as full of doubt about that yellowcake story as the critics assert or as even CIA director George Tenet has suggested. The section on Iraq's hunt for uranium, for example, asserts bluntly that "Iraq also began vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake" and that "acquiring either would shorten the time Baghdad needs to produce nuclear weapons."

Sullivan adds:

The president and the prime minister should go on the offensive soon. Maybe Blair will in front of Congress.

In my own mind, I always worry that I ascribe too much prescience to others. Still, given the way the President has played the game against the Democrats and the Media so far, I can't help but wonder - has Bush been planning this? Did he let this "crisis" blow up, knowing that he'd soon be pulling the rug out from under the naysayers to yet more political advantage?

It's hard to maintain astronomically-high approval ratings. But it's not hard to bounce back - Clinton taught us that.

"They Want to Win Wimbledon!" - On Monty Python's Flying Circus, only a Scotsman could save the world from a group of extraterrestrial blancmanges winning Wimbledon.

According to Mark Steyn, things haven't improved much for British tennis. The high point, according to this exerpt?:

In 1877, [Wimbledon] introduced the first Gentlemen's Singles lawn tennis championship, won by an upper-class boarding-school rackets player called Spencer Gore.

Gore was very different from today's star champions: He wore long cotton trousers with vast acres of empty white advertising space that Nike would die for. At that time, the British dominated the tennis scene, thanks to their grueling training regime: On the day of the big match, a chap would take the train up to London, drop in at the Savoy for a haunch of venison and some spotted dick washed down with a couple of stiff ones, toddle down to Wimbledon, change into the heavy underwear and a thick long-sleeved pullover, and dispatch Johnny Foreigner in three sets. Unfortunately, the Americans and Australians then introduced radical concepts like getting up early in the morning and practising.

The whole thing is worth a read.

Posted by Mitch at July 17, 2003 06:25 AM