The red font is out at Drudge and the left will be wetting itself over it for the rest of the day and long into the night, but there’s nothing here that isn’t self-evident. Once a state sponsor of terror, whose leading “pragmatist” has already run the calculus of a nuclear exchange with Israel, has the bomb then terrorists have it too and all bets on “containment” are off. The left has run its own calculus and concluded that nothing but nothing would be more nightmarish than another round of Cheney’s Strangelovean neocon adventurism, for which Bush’s comments here must surely be a pretext. It’s not that they want Iran to have the bomb; it’s that if it’s a choice between that and the catastrophic risk it entails versus an attack ordered by a Republican president, well, they’ll take their chances with ol’ Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The clip picks up with Bush having just answered a question about Putin’s latest apologia for Iran’s nuke program. And speaking of nukes, did Syria’s ambassador to the UN let slip a little secret? They’re formally denying it now and it seems odd to me that the ambassador would cop to it with Israelis present. It won’t endear him to the UN either, since its crackerjack nuclear watchdog — the one that’s watching Iran, mind you — apparently overlooked the Syrian facility entirely (as did U.S. intel, for that matter). I’m skeptical — which isn’t to say I doubt that it was a nascent nuke reactor. The target must have been awfully important for them to risk an incursion with rhetoric like this being batted about beforehand.