Appearing on Keith Olbermann's Thursday January 26 Countdown show on MSNBC, while comparing President Bush's words on his NSA wiretapping program with Bill Clinton's "lying," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd made known her view that she found Bill Clinton's lying "poignant and endearing" because "when Bill Clinton would deceive, he would throw in a semantic clue that let you know he was deceiving." She further added that "He would let you know he was lying, and then the right wing would come down so hard on him and overpunish him." Regarding Bush's citation of Iraq's liberation as a major justification for the war in the absence of WMD, Dowd pontificated that "you cannot do things that start with a lie, and they just lead to trouble down the road."
The segment started as Olbermann brought aboard Dowd to discuss Oprah Winfrey's apology for pushing discredited author James Frey's fraudulent book. The Countdown host drew parallels between Oprah's apology on her show earlier in the day and Bush's almost simultaneous news conference to answer critics of his controversial NSA spying program. When Olbermann turned his attention to Bush's news conference, he implied that Bush should perhaps apologize for the NSA program: "Maureen, right now, we want to look at a televised event in which nothing close to an apology was even hinted at."
After playing clips from the news conference, including Bush's awkward response to one question, Olbermann quipped that "the President will never know that he writes part of my newscast for me every night" and that "it sounded as if the burden of his version of what the definition of 'is' is got to be too much for him today, and he was ready to punt on that one."
Olbermann later mocked the administration's attempts to emphasize the international nature of the eavesdropping, posing the question: "Is not the whole idea of 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 argued that the reason the administration is trying to expand presidential power is because Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld "felt emasculated" when, during their time in the Ford Administration, presidential powers were shrunk.
http://newsbusters.org/node/3773