Okay, I’ve been wanting to use that title all day. The fact that I was ultimately unable to resist the temptation confirms that I am probably not the right person to write a letter to the Today Show about how Couric handled the interview. I might also be inclined to say something like, “It sure was nice of Ken Melhman to write up those questions ahead of time for Katie. That must save her a lot of needless time and effort. I hope she wrote him a nice thank-you note.” If you haven’t seen it yet, Crooks and Liars has the video. And I’ve written up a transcript, which is excerpted below the fold.
Couric: Obviously, as we just heard in Kelly O’Donnell’s report, that this week the Bush administration has been on the offensive defending what it now terms “a terrorist surveillance program” at every opportunity. And about half of Americans support the efforts to listen in on conversations between Al Qaeda suspects and those in the United States. If this potentially stops another terrorist attack like September 11, why not give the White House some latitude on this?
Dean: Democrats support the idea that we ought to spy on terrorists, and we support the idear that we need to eavesdrop from time to time. But we also believe that the president ought to obey the law. The law says that if you have an emergency reason to spy on Americans, that you can go ahead and do it, but you’ve got to justify it with the court afterwards. We don’t think that this president, who has a habit of putting himself above the law ought to be able to do this when he’s spying on Americans. This is not simply listening in to al Qaeda, it’s poking around into people’s private lives in order to see if they’re doing anything wrong.
Couric: Have you seen any evidence that this is happening? That the administration is somehow “poking into the private lives of Americans”?
Dean: Of course they are. You can’t tell who’s a terrorist and who’s not until you tap their phone. So we’ve always had, for many, many, many hundreds of years in this country, the idea that the courts had to give some prior justification in order to do this. Now, the law says, if the president feels like he can’t have prior justification, go ahead and do it anyway, but just go to the court after the fact. So the president–I don’t know why the president’s doing this. We all believe that we ought to be spying on al Qaeda, but we don’t believe that you ought to spy on American citizens without some kind of third party looking at this. That’s what makes the difference between America and other countries, like Iran, where the government can do anything they damn well please. We need to obey the law.
The other issue is, the president is breaking the law. There’s no need for it. We all support what the president’s trying to do in terms of fighting al Qaeda, but it’s a bad example for our kids for the president to insist that it’s okay for him to break the law. That is not right.
Couric: At the same time, obviously perception is everything and some of your opponents believe this is yet another example showing the Democrats are soft on defense and are not as vigilent as they should be in the war against terrorism. Why has this become such a poisonous, partisan issue? In other words, no one wants to see another terrorist attack, so why can’t both sides get together and figure this out instead of, you know, throwing mud at each other on a daily basis. Don’t you think the American people are tired of that?
Dean: We don’t think insisting that the president obey the law is throwing mud, first of all. And secondly, the president isn’t interested in hearing from anybody else. He’s not only not interested in hearing from Democrats–well, I can understand that, we’re the opposition party. He’s not interested in hearing from his own military. He has made a gross misjudgement in Iraq because he wouldn’t listen to General Shinseki and other military people who told him to do this differently. Wouldn’t even listen to his own Secretary of State Colin Powell. This is a headstrong president, who thinks he’s above the law. We don’t think that’s right. We think we ought to be tough on defense–I tell you one thing, if we get back in power, we’re going to make a real effort to go get Osama Bin Laden. We’re not going to let him lollygag around for four years after the September 11th attack. And we’re also going to equip our troops with the body armor they deserve in order to fight this war. We need to do a better job on defense than this President is doing.
You can read the rest of the transcript here.
