You've got to hand it to Fox News for fair and balanced address of the issues. This evening's Special Report with Brit Hume presented a pundit panel including the Nation's David Corn. The Nation is a leftist magazine best described as "anti-anti-Communist" and "always good for a laugh" by William F. Buckley and Andrew Sullivan, respectively.

Corn was polite, certainly - but he came from a critical left still eager to pounce on what's left of the uranium flap. Most importantly, his comments regarding the slightly facetious assertion by the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol that the past two weeks may have been an adroit trap set by Karl Rove.

Essentially, Corn introduced a dialectic disengage with uranium: agreed, the White House produced intelligence papers that not only knock down suspicions of whether Saddam even had a worrying nuclear ambition but also make clear for the public that the Niger documents were not the only source for conclusions to be drawn. He didn't try to push the issue much. What he did, however, was delicately leave uranium behind and move on to exploit the next uncertainly: Iraqi links with al Qaeda. The matter was different, but only like a Mad-Lib. No absolutely incriminating evidence; therefore, Corn offered that Bush must have lied.

If Corn is to be taken as a stormcrow, the left is soon to dash out of the way of the uranium accusation's collapse and become immediately acrimonious about terrorist links instead, as if they had not been proven wrong and intellectually dishonest on yet another subject. Absent any head-hanging for all the off-key prewar predictions, we have every reason to believe this failure won't dent their collective conscience, either.