"There were two types of senators... the briefed, and the briefed-nots."

That's Sheryl Gay Stolberg's sharp take on the Hayden confirmation hearings:

The former were mostly polite. The latter, especially Democrats, threw the Congressional equivalent of a temper tantrum.

General Hayden, President Bush's nominee to run the Central Intelligence Agency, invoked what he termed "a very crude airman's metaphor" in suggesting he believed lawmakers should have been informed earlier by the White House of its secretive domestic eavesdropping program, which he oversaw when he ran the National Security Agency.

"If you want people with the craft," the general said, "you've got to put them on the manifest."

So Hayden sets himself apart from the administration on the one issue that is reliably riling the Senators, and the Senators' behavior bolster the assumption that if we only knew the details of the program, we would approve.

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Hayden seems to have a way with words, as he found different ways of saying the same thing, instead of just annoyingly repeating a stock phrase in response to the many questions asking for information he could only provide in the closed session. Example: "I will give you just a touch more granularity in the closed session."