The obvious answer -- not found yet, but the hunt goes on -- never appeases the questioners, who, by their relentless questioning, give away their game. The game, it would seem, is to shake confidence in the worth and prospects of our Iraqi endeavors. No WMDs yet? It can only be because there were none to start with, but, pssst, pass it on, the administration didn't care, just wanted a war and so on.
Now the "yellowcake" story (yellowcake being lightly processed uranium). Never mind that the president's statement was literally true -- the British government did report what Bush said it reported. Never mind that the statement was more illustrative than anything else -- an exempli gratia of Saddam's ferocious ways.
We'd been saying for years -- everyone had been saying -- that Saddam was a menace, without whom the world would be a better place. Working up the intestinal fortitude to get rid of him was the challenge. Bush rose to it. Who, in his absence, was going to, Kofi Annan? Jacques Chirac?
The yellowcake flap is a silly flap, getting sillier, that has to do chiefly with John Edwards and the brethren pulling long, scandalized faces and pointing lugubriously in the president's direction. Great way to win a peace, gentlemen (all right, a quasi-peace) -- turn the people against the man trying to win it. But as the saying goes, that's politics.