THE TODAY SHOW is one of the last places you'd expect to find journalism being practiced, but Dan Froomkin tells us that's what happened in New Orleans this morning when Matt Lauer interviewed Pres. Bush as he "helped" with a Habitat for Humanity project.

It was such a lovely photo op -- President Bush and his wife joining the volunteers building a house in Louisiana. The perfect backdrop for an upbeat interview, live on NBC's Today Show.

But then Matt Lauer had to go and pull back the curtain and ask: Isn't this all just an empty photo op?

What ensued was an unusually testy interview, with Bush waving off more questions than he answered, chiding Lauer for quoting too many Democrats in his windups and making it clear that he would have been much happier fielding questions about the charitable nature of the American people than about politics.

Here's the text; here's the video.

What's next? Katie Couric asking Harriet Miers if Pres. Bush only nominated her for SCOTUS because she thinks he's brilliant?