The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart finds it “very sad” that former Vice President Dick Cheney seems to be suffering from signs of premature senility.

When Cheney was interviewed by the FBI in 2004 about his role in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, he responded 72 different times that he could not recall details of events a year earlier.

“We’ve all grown accustomed to thinking of ex-Vice President Dick Cheney as a villain,” Stewart stated soberly. “But did you know he’s also an old man?”

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Stewart then introduced a new segment — “Is Our Dick Going Soft?” — in which he noted several things Cheney professed to be unable to remember during the FBI interview, such as “the time his press secretary Cathie Martin first told him and Scooter Libby that Valerie Plame … worked for the CIA.”

Cheney’s most outrageous lapse of memory, however, came when his was shown his own handwritten “notes on Joe Wilson’s New York Times op-ed: ‘Have they done this sort of thing before? … Or did his wife send him on a junket?'”

According to the FBI summary, Cheney “said his review of that portion of the document did not ring a bell as to why he wrote those words.”

“You admit you wrote it but you don’t know why you wrote it?” Stewart asked incredulously.

Stewart then snickered, in his best Cheney imitation, “Heh, heh, heh. I have one of those evil dead hands that does things on its own. … I’m an enigma wrapped in a man-sized safe.”

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Stewart pointed out, however, that earlier this year, when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi insisted she could not recall being briefed on waterboarding by the CIA, Cheney had commented, “I think what often happens in these circumstances is once a controversy develops, then some of the people that were briefed get forgetful.”

“That’s the hard Dick we were taking for years,” Stewart concluded.

This video is from Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, broadcast Nov. 3, 2009.