While Washington D.C. and other elitist capitals of the world hummed with the litany of Bush's descent, Iraq's irretrievability, the evil of Paul Wolfowitz and the rise of a presidential candidate whose attempts to define himself only further illustrate his lack of rudder, news happened:

Syrian technicians accompanying unknown equipment were killed in the train explosion in North Korea on April 22, according to a report in a Japanese newspaper. A military specialist on Korean affairs revealed that the Syrian technicians were killed in the explosion in Ryongchon in the northwestern part of the country, according to the Sankei Shimbun. The specialist said the Syrians were accompanying "large equipment" and that the damage from the explosion was greatest in the portion of the train they occupied. The source said North Korean military personnel with protective suits responded to the scene soon after the explosion and removed material only from the Syrians' section of the train.

...The United States and other countries have expressed concern that Syrian and North Korea are developoing Scud-D missiles, as well as chemical and biological weapons.

Syria, the country where some of Saddam's WMD material might have gone, whose leadership wages a campaign to smother liberated Iraq. North Korea, the geographically codified hell on earth, a country with a record of perfidy outstripped only by its list of horrors committed against its own people and the rest of mankind; and a would-be vendor, to Saddam's erstwhile regime, of advanced missile technology. After all the manufactured outrage leveled at the White House and denigration of the intelligence community for their sins of maintaining the conclusion that, before March of 2003, satisfied every consequential nation in the world but Ba'athist Iraq, we ought to ask again: has a skepticism less forgiving of democratic nations than compulsive dictatorships become conventional wisdom because of or in spite of fact?

MORE: IP watches headlines as they come in.