It’s been amazing to watch Administration shills move the goalposts in order to find new ways to justify the President’s lawbreaking. When the “Six Degrees of Osama Bin Laden” game didn’t adequately explain why the President deserves to subvert the constitution and avoid any judicial oversight, suddenly the number of people getting spied on got smaller and smaller. In an interview with CNN last week, that trend hit rock bottom when Sen. Saxby Chambliss tried to minimize the footprint of this program so much that it started to sound like a parody :

KAGAN: Senator, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee that you are, I would like to ask you a couple questions. First of all, the NSA domestic wiretap scandal and controversy. Do you support the president and his take that this program is needed in order to keep Americans safe?

CHAMBLISS: Well, I do, Daryn. You know, the folks in opposition to this program would try to make you believe that they are intercepting — that we are intercepting conversations between two people who are carrying on legitimate conversations. That’s simply not the fact.

First of all, these monitoring are extremely limited in number. And as to who they are — and they’re initiated by calls from outside the United States from an individual that we don’t suspect, Daryn, is a terrorist, we know the person is a terrorist and gets up every day thinking what harm they can do to Americans.

When that individual make as phone call, which is usually to Germany, France or some part — some other part of the world, we monitor those calls occasionally. That call comes to the United States — and that call that comes to the United States is not coming for a legitimate purpose. It’s coming for the purpose of potentially planning and scheming to carry out an act of terrorism inside the United States by somebody who is here for the wrong reason.

This isn’t a friend of a friend we’re monitoring here, these are actual terrorist who are in the middle of planning an attack. We know that every phone call was made with the explicit purpose of planning an attack on Americans. So, NSA mind-reading aside, why was this “extremely limited” program conducted behind the backs of the FISA court?

KAGAN: But what would you say to people who say that they want to be safe here in the U.S.? Their big concern is those limitations and without a warrant, there’s no checks and balances. And they’re concerned about where the line would be drawn in terms of who would be allowed to be listened into?

CHAMBLISS: Well, we have a process called the FISA process, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, that does allow us to get warrants to monitor conversations inside the United States. And we use that from time to time.

But unfortunately, if we are monitoring somebody in Pakistan who make as call to the United States and asks the question of the person inside the United States — listen, I know we’ve been talking about carrying out this act of terrorism, tell me when and where it’s going to take place, obviously, we don’t have time to go get a warrant before that person inside the United States answers that question.

And let me assure you, and assure the viewers that are watching this, that we have used this process with success to interrupt and disrupt potential activity by terrorists inside the United States. It’s worked, even though we used it on a very, very limited scale.

And that’s the trump card right there. We never, ever use this program, but the times we have used it, we prevented terrorists from blowing up the whole world. Nice Dodge there, Senator. Of course it would have been nice for Rush’s favorite feminazi to point out that the FISA court allows a 72 hour grace period before applying for a retroactive warrant, but that might undo the delicate “balance” that CNN has worked so hard to achieve.