David Kay came to Washington. While many on the left cackled about the lack of clearly marked stockpiles of ready-to-use weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and continued to insinuate that Bush viewed the threat as specifically "imminent" - he did not, quite clearly rebuking the idea with "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent" - David Kay delivered a very encouraging public report. Where some see a vindication of Saddam Hussein, Andrew Sullivan has been blogging overtime to lay out the big picture. His strongest point quotes Kay directly:

If you don't have time, here are my highlights. First off:

We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN.

Translation: Saddam was lying to the U.N. as late as 2002. He was required by the U.N. to fully cooperate. He didn't. The war was justified on those grounds alone. Case closed. Some of the physical evidence still remains, despite what was clearly a deliberate, coordinated and thorough attempt to destroy evidence before[,] during and after the war.

And as we all know, "international law" for some is less a standard among nations to be enforced than an obstacle for the United States. Hold brutal dictators accountable for violated resolutions - and violated resolutions on the violation of previous resolutions? For shame!

Sullivan goes on to highlight more evidence of Saddam's discrete weapons programs. Don't forget this, either. Bottom line? Senator Jay Rockefeller was smugly chatting with the press yesterday about "no surprises," though what actually came to no surprise was Saddam's relentless drive towards [and illegal possession of!] catastrophic weapons.

AND ANOTHER THING: Here's a lesson in deductive reasoning. The remnants of dictatorships don't ferret out and assassinate scientists if no programs or stockpiles exist to which the scientists can lead Allied troops.

GO AHEAD, SURPRISE ME: Watching David Kay's interview on television this morning was encouraging and frustrating. Encouraging: David Kay repeated to Tony Snow an impressive amount of finds, including botulinum precursor ordered into a scientist's refrigerator; and the factual tidbit that Iraq houses dozens of weapons caches, some as large as [50] square miles, twenty-six of which are high-priority and have not been searched yet. Frustrating: Kay himself was annoyed at how newspapers and other media ignored almost all of it. Which makes this recap, published in the International Herald Tribune and reprinted in the New York Times, important to offest the politicized obfuscation we saw a couple of days ago. Good for them.