Never Mind!

Long ago, back when my wife and I were courting, we would go out on Saturday night. We would generally go to a restaurant and perhaps catch a movie, but would always be back to her parent's house in time for Saturday Night Live. This was pretty much the extent of our dating life--I worked out of town during the week and she was working full time, as well as finishing graduate school. Anyway, we both loved the now-classic SNL skits. A particular favorite was Gilda Radner as Rosanne Rosannadanna. Radner played a news reporter who inevitably got her story totally, terribly, agonizingly wrong. Eventually, she would be called down by the ever-correct Jane Curtin, causing Rosannadanna to ultimately close with "Never Mind."

That is what I thought of this morning upon reading the Dallas Morning News. The National Intelligence Estimate--representing the consensus of all 16 American spy agencies--concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. This information, by the way, was available to President Bush a month or two back at the time of the now infamous news conference, in which he did some major saber-rattling about the Iranian nuclear threat, while throwing about references to World War III. As the story notes:

Rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a U. S. foreign policy debate.

Never Mind.