Pulling teeth with Fearless Leader

Recent interviews with the president have seen him doing what he does best: responding to questions with aphorisms, using patriotic buzzwords that everyone loves to hear, and talking about anything but reality. Katie Couric gushingly thanked him for sharing his broken-record routine with her, but that's not how I'd respond to a man who treated me like the stereotypical yokel treats a non-English speaker or an impatient adult treats a slow 8 year-old. That's the treatment Matt Lauer of the Today Show got.

To Lauer's enormous credit, and given the strange circumstances, he pushed as hard as was possible on the subject of the president's right to torture people. The way you knew he'd pushed hard was that the president began talking in smaller and smaller circles. He needs to be able to do this to keep people safe. He kept repeating that he needed these powers "within the law," and that "we don't torture." Lauer started to describe "water-boarding." The president refused to talk about "techniques that we use on people." He began to sputter, "Let me finish." Once again, he climbed on his little one-man railroad that traveled from "protecting the nation" to "we don't torture" to "within the law." You half-expected little springs to start bouncing out of his ears. "It's my job to protect YOU," he told Lauer at one point. What was more significant was the president's demeanor. He was loud. He was poking at Lauer's chest. He seemed convinced that his argument would be more compelling if he e-nun-ci-a-ted it like a man chewing steel and if, while doing so, he JUST MADE IT LOUDER.

The Daily Show has long been pointing this out, and for me it isn't getting any easier to listen to a total nimrod who thinks his interlocutor is the stone-headed dummy. (Includes a link to the video.)