If Cheney had read the Seattle papers yesterday...

...he might have caught Joel Connelly's examination of the 'imperial Vice-Presidency' in the P-I. (I don't know if the Veep is as news-averse as his putative boss, but articles like this could make it happen.)

What are some of the cornerstones of Cheney's "prerogatives of privelege"?

Joel provides a few.

The Royal Hunt: The vice president is an outdoorsman, not on the public lands where he wants to put oil rigs, but at private reserves such as the 10,000-acre Rolling Rock Club in southwestern Pennsylvania...

The Royal Rationale: Nobody has ever provided a scintilla of supportive evidence, but Dick Cheney claimed last year that Iraq was a looming nuclear menace to the United States...

The Royal Silence: The vice president convened like-minded men in the spring of 2001 to hammer out a national energy strategy. It's now embodied in pending legislation that contains more than $30 billion in corporate subsidies...

The Royal Connection: Working under a no-bid contract, the Halliburton Co. has been supplying everything from meals for U.S. troops to gasoline for Iraqi citizens. It has contracts worth more than $1.7 billion in Iraq...

If you ask me (yeah, I know. No one did.) it all adds up to a royal pain.