And so begins the use of the Hutton report, which is being roundly criticized overseas, to spin Kay's revelations about Iraqi WMD.

Here's David Brooks priming the starter on the NewsHour yesterday:

And so Kay made this serious set of conclusions, which suggests we've got a serious intelligence problem and instead of talking about the serious intelligence problem, instead of accepting this testimony which is supported by the Hutton testimony in Britain by the way, that nobody misled anybody, that it was a honest mistake, what we had on Capitol Hill today, led by Carl Levin and Ted Kennedy, was a series of unsubstantiated charges: still, regardless of the evidence, they must have been misleading, must have leaned on the CIA and I think David Kay found there is just no evidence. We have serious intelligence problems but they're playing politics with it up there.

Whore.

[UPDATE: Mark Shields is such a pansy:

The president said, OK, on October 2002 we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud. Now that's about as dire and serious and grave a threat as you can give to the American people. And why isn't the president or anybody at the White House angry or upset if they got this defective intelligence and they gave the defective intelligence to the American people and we went to war based upon it and we're looking at 3,000 American either dead, wounded, crippled or disabled -- as a consequence of that? Now, I mean that's really ... where is the outrage?

Jeebus. It's not about bad intelligence, it's about fucking stovepiping. The CIA gave everything they had -- and it was used selectively by Cheney or those close to him. Why can't Shields talk about THAT?]