You know he’s getting desperate when he starts breaking out the Dick Cheney references.

Via Politico:

President Barack Obama used a television interview set to air Monday night to defend his administration’s use of far-reaching surveillance programs as carefully supervised and controlled.

Obama also appeared to reject comparisons between himself and Vice President Dick Cheney, who strongly backed similar surveillance efforts in the George W. Bush administration and has defended Obama’s continuation of national security-related programs similar in many respects to those pursued by the previous administration.

“Some people say, ‘Well, you know, Obama was this raving liberal before. Now he’s, you know, Dick Cheney.’ Dick Cheney sometimes says, “Yeah, you know? He took it all lock, stock, and barrel,” the president told interviewer Charlie Rose in the exchange recorded Sunday. “My concern has always been not that we shouldn’t do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism, but rather are we setting up a system of checks and balances?”

In an interview that’s been heavily promoted by the White House and Obama aides, the president acknowledged that a program which collects massive amounts of data on telephone calls made in or through the U.S. could theoretically be used to invade individuals’ privacy, even potentially yielding conclusions about callers’ health conditions.