Great thoughts from Megan McArdle on the miscarriage of the left's Mordred to Bush's Arthur, the would-be "Uraniumgate." She quotes a Michael Kinsley column that fixedly works to wrangle scandal, duplicity and conspiracy to defraud from a questionable intelligence item, itself of subordinate importance to Bush and Blair's casus belli. Says Megan:

When the president's critics are reduced to quibbling over grammar, the battle is lost. This scandal may hurt the president, as the clever arguments about the meaning of the word "is" hurt Clinton. But I think it has far greater potential to damage the opposition, who, by engaging in such arguments, make themselves look like pettyfogging quibblers out to injure the president by any means necessary.

Not even, Megan. Clinton, we should recall, actually did lie under oath. Kinsley can excavate and contrast all he wants, but it doesn't bolster the otherwise flimsy girders holding up this whole travesty.

At last look, the accusation operates on the premise that the United States went to war not because Saddam Hussein had flagrantly defied United Nations disarmament verification, was in possession of a wide variety of illegal weapons and remained a menace to international security, but because British intelligence reported that the Iraqi dictator had sought purchase of uranium from Africa.

Is that too stringent? At the very least, demands to hold Bush accountable clearly imply that the failed uranium deal was a major moral and legal impetus up to, during and after military action. If errors in judgment on minor points made prior to the engagement were impeachable, they'd be holding trial in the Senate today because Operation Iraqi Freedom cost less than planned.

And if, unamused by the comic irony just previous, we insist that No, this isn't a "minor point" to attribute to the obscurity of intelligence and fog of war? It's not advisable: the charge of war on the condition of deception just doesn't stand up. The specific reference to uranium became understood as questionable (or at least less blitheringly obvious as the rest of Saddam's infractions) some time before the final warning from Bush and the beginning of hostilities. Are memories so short? The revelation certainly wasn't a talking point for those against Saddam's deposition: we were instead warned of the Arab street, international opinion, incredible casualties, mass refugees, and global war. As for Bush and Blair, nuclear weapons were far down the legal list, well below biological and chemical programs and stockpiles. Fears for combat centered squarely on Saddam's documented chemical and biological possessions. In the midst of the fighting, it's not as if every crawler scuttling on cable news read:

CENTRAL COMMAND EXPECTS 'ONLY DAYS LEFT BEFORE WE WIN AND SCOOP UP THAT URANIUM OVER WHICH WE WENT TO WAR, YOU BETCHA'

Which brings us to a simpler explanation for this foundering attack on a yet-imperviously trustworthy president: the uranium blowup is simply Plan C, and didn't pop up until after the first and second hamstring jobs on Bush failed to take.

For those who, when faced with weapons and programs that have not materialized, suspect not pathological mischief from Saddam but instead duplicity from Bush: Megan's right. Only stories with truth to them have legs; as soon as the Bush administration can recover from the shock of realizing how unscrupulous and politically empty their opposition is, the shelf date for this one will be nigh.

UPDATE: Robert Kuttner writes in the Boston Globe that he's quite happy to see the press "finally making an issue of President Bush's knowing use of a faked intelligence report on Iraq's supposed nuclear weapons program." Mr. Kuttner, the press couldn't concentrate on ginning up scandal from the uranium statement because they were too busy pinning other grievous crimes on the president, such as imperialist warmongering, mass murder, lobbing handouts to fat cats, losing on the road to Baghdad and watching a museum be stripped. Read this article - you can hear the man seething from behind his keyboard.