And that’s not the point

This week the Daily Show unfairly made fun of talk show hosts who questioned Condi Rice over and over last Sunday about whether she would run for president, but the reason they did so was that it took several rounds to get her to give an answer not containing weasel words like “I have no intention of running.” So North Korea can take her assertion that the US has “no intention” of attacking it and “no desire” to do so for what it’s worth.

And this doesn’t help either:

In an effort to increase pressure on North Korea, the Bush administration told its Asian allies in briefings earlier this year that Pyongyang had exported nuclear material to Libya. That was a significant new charge, the first allegation that North Korea was helping to create a new nuclear weapons state.

But that is not what U.S. intelligence reported, according to two officials with detailed knowledge of the transaction. North Korea, according to the intelligence, had supplied uranium hexafluoride -- which can be enriched to weapons-grade uranium -- to Pakistan. It was Pakistan, a key U.S. ally with its own nuclear arsenal, that sold the material to Libya. The U.S. government had no evidence, the officials said, that North Korea knew of the second transaction.

If we didn’t already have the leaked memo about what a great issue Terri Schiavo’s brain-dead body was for the R’s, we might wonder why Congressional intervention took the form of a law moving the case to the federal courts, which just drags the whole thing out, when the law could just as easily have ordered that she be kept alive forever and ever. Tom DeLay even says that permanently preventing her feeding tube being removed is “not the point.” No, you bottom-feeding demagogic blowhard, it surely isn’t. GeeDubya will fly back to Washington specifically to sign the bill.

Favorite headline: “Boston Archbishop Will Wash Women’s Feet.” I’m sure he will.