Maureen Dowd on Countdown with Keith Olbermann

Keith Olbermann had New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on his show last night. She really has an entertaining way of criticizing the Bush administration. Here's an excerpt taken from the transcript at MSNBC:

OLBERMANN: On several occasions in the last few years, this White House has seemingly defied this idea that a lot of societies have been held together by, that no man can hold back the tide. They're going to stand there, they're going to try to do exactly that.

If it doesn't really work, they'll say, Well, yes, it did work, you're wrong. And if you question them about that, they'll get you in a semantical discussion. Is not the whole idea of that—this definition, international versus domestic, is this not by itself a red herring? I mean, you could call it intergalactic spying, and the issue is the legality, not the name, right?

DOWD: Don't give Cheney and Rummy ideas. They're going to be doing intergalactic spying.

It's all a red herring. What this is about, Dick Cheney wants to throw off all of these rules. He wants to go to war without permission, he wants to torture without permission, he wants to snoop without permission, because he and Rummy were Ford officials at a time when presidential power shrank. They felt emasculated. They did not like it. They stewed about it for 30 years.

Now they are trying to do everything they can to expand presidential power. So they're doing exactly what they want to.

OLBERMANN: Who has enabled this? I mean, in a perverse way, is it almost necessary to say that Bill Clinton paved the way for George Bush to conduct a kind of fingers-in-his-ears, shout La-la-la-la-la, presidency?

DOWD: No, they're two entirely different things, because when Bill Clinton would deceive, he would throw in a semantic clue that let you know he was deceiving. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” we knew what he meant by that. You know, I did not—about Doe (ph) -- I didn't break the laws of this country.

So it was sort of poignant and endearing. He would let you know he was lying, and then the right wing would come down so hard on him and overpunish him.

And in the case of Bush, he's just in a completely different reality. You know, they call us the reality-based community, and they create their own reality. And so Bush is just in a bubble. And when you're in the bubble, you don't know you're in the bubble.