Bill Bennett's fawn-tastic Morning In America exit interview with Dick Cheney is filled with precisely the sort of ass-kissing and side-stepping you'd expect from this pair of glad-handing, decrepit yobbos. It contains goopy pillow talk about fly-fishing and Cheney's high dudgeon over Obama's plan to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prisons -- the Bush Administration's rarefied monument to bizarro justice, where the guilty never stand trial and the innocent remain detained forever. At the end of it, you'll be left with the same sort of question you may have had after reading Stephen Hayes' man-on-Cheney BDSM classic. Nevertheless, I'd highlight this moment for future remembrance:
CHENEY: We get into the whole area, for example, the Terrorist Surveillance Program --
BENNETT: Right, the perfect example.
CHENEY: Great example; important program, allows us to intercept communications from terrorists coming in to the United States, and a program we put in place using presidential authority. And it's worked. It's really given us some very, very good intelligence. Well, certain key members of Congress were briefed on that program from the very beginning. I used to preside over those briefings in my office with the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate on the intelligence committees, for example, or on one occasion the entire congressional leadership down in the Situation Room in the West Wing.
What happened then was they had the information we had, they knew how we were doing it, they knew what we were producing through that process. But then when -- Nancy Pelosi, for example, was part of that group. But then it became public. The New York Times broke the story I think in December of '05, won the Pulitzer for it, which always aggravated me.
Hey, Dick, I got to tell you, it always aggravated me that the Times won a Pulitzer for that, too! Mainly because my basic rights are so well elucidated by the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States that it shouldn't require journalistic excellence to remind people that, yes, THEY EXIST. I guess we all have our own cross to bear.