The worms are turning

Atrios has an excellent post summarising the state of play on the US media. In just a week the Bush/Blair conventional wisdom has collapsed.

John Howard should read the Time article, in particular, with special care:

The Niger yellowcake uranium imbroglio concerns a piece of intelligence Washington knew was bad that was nonetheless restated in President Bush's State of the Union address. A bureaucratic snafu, says the Bush Administration, and one which doesn't detract at all from the case for war; in fact it was hardly a significant part of that case in the first place. Indeed. But three months after taking control of Iraq, the deeper question looming on the horizon is less how one item of bad intelligence slipped into a keynote speech than how so much of the intelligence the Administration had believed was solid appears to have been rather liquid, even gaseous.

Time is not usually widely-regarded as an organ of the Left. If Blair and Bush find themselves not just under fire, but ridiculed, for advancing arguments identical with Howard's than that is very bad news for the prime minister.