Dubya's crew is still trying to argue that we needed to go to war, like, immediately in order to keep Saddam from getting weapons of mass destruction. As evidence for which, their latest offering is centrifuge plans and parts buried in a garden more than a decade ago, and not retrieved since.

That justified immediate war.

Meanwhile, the news from North Korea is... in flux. About six months ago, when the North Koreans blew the dust off their plutonium reprocessing plant, the word on the street was that if nothing changed, they'd have enough weapons-grade goop for six to ten warheads in about six months. Sure enough, a few days ago, the Yomiuri Shimbun had an interview with one of Clinton's Korea hands, who had done the math and stated authoritatively that they've got the glop... well, pretty much now. But, he said, things could be worse; at least, they didn't have the technology to make warheads small enough to fit on their missiles.

Or so he claimed. But this was a Clinton hand. Might he be ill-informed? Out of the loop?

Indeed, he is. The New York Times reports this morning that the North Koreans do have the technology to deliver nuclear weapons on their missiles, according to the latest reports from the CIA.

You never could trust the word from the Clinton administration.

Oh, one more thing. The North Koreans are now openly threatening to abandon the armistice that ended the Korean war.

Recall that the North Koreans started doing all this -- particularly, taking their plutonium weapons program out of mothballs -- in direct response to the belligerent tack which had been taken by Dubya's crew on entering office, and its abandonment of the Clinton administration's more diplomatic approach, which left the North Koreans feeling that they had no choice but to resume weapons development the quickest way they knew how, to head off an attack which they expected to come no matter what.

Gee, it's good to have the grownups back in charge. Isn't it?

To head off some objections -- yes, part of what was going on here is that even while the North Koreans had their plutonium program in mothballs, they were developing a uranium enrichment program -- a slower way to get an inferior bomb, but it still would have gotten them a bomb. But that was probably just a ploy for more aid, witness what happened when, in response to Dubya's White House machismo, they decided that they needed not just the threat to develop a bomb, but, well... a bomb.