From the San Francisco Chronicle

From the article

There is no proof that Saddam Hussein or his Baathist lieutenants didn't raid the stock before the invasion. Yet days into the story, the New York Times is sticking with its first impression.

Oh, and here's a little item you have to go to the New York Sun to read: U.S. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer had asked the IAEA to remove the al Qaqaa bombs in 1995 -- but the IAEA refused. As Duelfer told the Sun, "The policy was if acquired for the WMD program and used for it, it should be subject to destruction. The HMX was just that. Nevertheless, the IAEA decided to let Iraq keep the stuff, like, they needed more explosives."

So the source of the NYT story about Bush letting the bad bombs get away was the agency that was supposed to destroy the weapons but chose instead to let Hussein keep them.

Sen. John Kerry doesn't care. Camp Kerry jumped on the issue and started running TV spots bashing Bush for losing the explosives as "misjudgments" that could cost American lives.

Bush is right that Kerry was wrong to embrace this story "60 Minutes"- style before it has been verified. But the real issue is that Kerry has blamed Bush for everything. Why is Osama bin Laden still alive? It's because of Bush. (Forget that Kerry voiced no qualms about diverting troops from the hunt for bin Laden to a hunt for Hussein when he voted authority for the war.)

And

Things are better in Iraq, King noted, than anyone would guess from the media coverage. (King just got back from his latest trip to Iraq last week.) He remembers visiting last year and being surprised to see an amusement park in Mosul so jammed its parking lots overflowed. On this trip, he saw a Baghdad with schools and a hospital reopened. Because Americans don't see that Baghdad on their TVs, he noted, they are "much less supportive than they would be if they saw everything that was happening over there."