By Byron York

There are undoubtedly people who have a more vivid memory of Will Ferrell’s “Saturday Night Live” version of the Axis of Evil -- the one in which Ferrell, as President George W. Bush, denounced Iran, Iraq and “one of those Koreas” -- than of the real thing from Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address. A lot of comedians made a lot of fun of the Axis of Evil concept. But now, more than seven years later, it’s looking pretty solid.

This is what Bush said on the subject of Iran, Iraq and North Korea: “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an Axis of Evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.”

You can argue until the end of time about Iraq’s place in that group. But is there anything you would disagree with in the former president’s assessment of Iran and North Korea? The last administration’s comedy fodder is this administration’s bipartisan consensus.

Recently, I called David Frum, who is a friend and also the Bush speechwriter who came up with the “axis” concept. (He originally wrote it as “Axis of Hatred.”) Given the seriousness of the situations in Iran and North Korea today, I asked, why all the mocking of the concept, virtually from the very beginning?

“The thing I never cease to marvel at,” Frum told me, “is that the phrase has become more and more of a joke even as the demonstration of the validity of the concept has become more extensive.” Frum listed some of the things the public knows now that it didn’t when Bush gave his speech -- the A.Q. Khan network, the Iran-North Korea connection, the Iran-Hamas link. That’s just the kind of thing Bush was talking about.