Niger Yellowcake Twofer in the Weekly Standard: Freddy ("The Beetle," as McLaughlin used to say) Barnes thinks this whole flap is the fault of an administration that tried too hard to "move on" from a quasi-defensible claim in the SOTU:

By conceding a mistake, the White House aimed to bring the matter to closure. Instead, a full-blown controversy erupted. In flinching, the White House aroused critics of Bush and the war with Iraq to a frenzy. Democrats charged the White House had cooked intelligence information and misled the American people about the urgency of going to war with Iraq. The Washington press corps was obsessed with the issue and peppered Bush and his aides with questions about it as they traveled from Senegal to Botswana to Nigeria. The White House was on the defensive. Bush's Africa tour was overshadowed by a credibility issue back home.

Next door, William ("Don't Call Me Billy") Kristol thinks it's another brilliant plot by Karl Rove to gull the Dems:

Almost two weeks ago, the president ordered his White House staff to bollix up its explanation of that now-infamous 16-word "uranium from Africa" sentence in his State of the Union address. As instructed, and with the rhetorical ear and political touch for which they have become justly renowned, assorted senior administration officials, named and unnamed, proceeded to unleash all manner of contradictory statements. The West Wing stood by the president's claim. Or it didn't. Or the relevant intelligence reports had come from Britain and were faulty. Or hadn't and weren't. Smelling blood, just as they'd been meant to, first the media--and then the Democratic party--dove into the resulting "scandal" head first and fully clothed.

The idea, I presume, is to get the Dems, particularly the presidential candidates, to lean into the wind on this issue. When the wind dies down, said candidates do a faceplant.

The third possibility, of course, is that Bob Graham is right and Bush should be impeached.

I think Freddy's on the money.