Who did it? That Dick there!

Whenever one detects a faint smell of shit emanating from this particular White House, the stench always seems to come from the Office of the Vice President.

There appears to be nothing too slimey for him to stick his podgy digits into. First we find his fat fingers all over the illegal wiretapping fiasco, with him suggesting:

In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials.

But N.S.A. lawyers, trained in the agency's strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any eavesdropping without warrants, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001.

The N.S.A.'s position ultimately prevailed. But just how Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the agency at the time, designed the program, persuaded wary N.S.A. officers to accept it and sold the White House on its limits is not yet clear.

And, of course, we already know that he's up to his neck in Plamegate:

Vice President Dick Cheney made handwritten notations on a July 2003 newspaper column that indicate he was focused on a critic of the administration's Iraq policy, according to a court filing in the C.I.A. leak case.Mr. Cheney's notes were cited in a prosecution brief in the case against the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr.

The entries were made on a copy of an Op-Ed article by Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador, that was published in The New York Times on July 6, 2003.

The leak case involves the disclosure that Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie, was a C.I.A. officer."Those annotations support the proposition that publication of the Wilson Op-Ed acutely focused the attention of the vice president and the defendant - his chief of staff - on Mr. Wilson, on the assertions made in his article, and on responding to those assertions," said the legal papers filed Friday by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the case.

In neat writing above the text of the column, prosecutors say, Mr. Cheney wrote: "Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Amb. to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?"

When he's not encouraging staff to name undercover CIA agents, or illegally monitoring the calls made by millions of Americans as they go about their daily business, the mild mannered Mr. Cheney likes to relax and unwind by shooting old men in the face.

He's a PR man's dream is Dick. And aptly named too.

Tags: Dick, Cheney, NSA, scandal, wiretapping, Plamegate, Valerie, Plame, Joe, Wilson, Niger, Uranium,