[Bush, Spying]

Bush on NSA Spying, Briefly.

"My fellow Americans, 9/11 scared you a great deal and therefore I have taken advantage of your pliability by enacting certain practices, about which select, similarly pliant Congressmen were insufficiently briefed. You need not trouble yourself worrying these practices, which I'm so certain are legal I haven't bothered to mention them to the other branches of government, except, as I said, only in passing. Generally in the hallway, when I noticed they were on their cell phones."

"Of course, I would never spy on you, unless you were connected to al Qaida, and I did have to do a little preliminary investigation to establish that first. But don't be troubled unless you are an evildoer. I am also not mining details of your lives, unless you consider information about the calls you made to be details. In which case I am."

"But the real evildoers here are the leakers and the printers of leaks, who weaken us at home and strengthen the enemy, which is the ACLU. Pardon me? I mean al Qaida. God bless America."

Okay, so it wasn't exactly like that, but close. Bush, today:

We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans. Our efforts are focused on links to al Qaeda and their known affiliates. So far we've been very successful in preventing another attack on our soil.

As a general matter, every time sensitive intelligence is leaked, it hurts our ability to defeat this enemy.

Again, at least the weather's nice.