Things got gradually more “tense,” as O’Donnell described it, when the subject turned to the Bush administration’s post-9/11 assessment of the threat that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq posed. Rice’s responses were mainly Bush-era Golden Oldies about things Hussein did in the early nineties, but O’Donnell’s interrogation was a 180 degree shift from the more deferential treatment the administration received from the press at the time.

Some might even say O’Donnell swung the pendulum too far the other way, at times replacing actual questions with, as Rice observed, “your own commentary,” but he did land some powerful blows, such as his invocation of Rice’s famous “mushroom cloud” quote.