Barton Kellman and Jo Becker's long account of Dick Cheney's not-so-quiet accumulation of power since January 2001 in today's Washington Post is the best piece of journalism I've read this year, not least for the surprises that should by now surprise no one (yet still do): how then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez is a spineless hatchet man besides being a smiling non-entity; how staff members like David Addington and John Yoo rewrote the rules of wartime to create, essentially, an ad-hoc extra-Constitutional Committee of Public Safety with unlimited powers and no Congressional supervision; the utter ruthlessness with which the Vice-President eliminated rivals like Colin Powell and then Attorney General John Ashcroft; and, finally, the detachment of the President of the United States, who, according to this article, seems to have agreed to an expansion of the power of the Office of the Vice President without so much as reading the fine print (the alternative is too sinister to reckon). The first two paragraphs set the tone:

Just past the Oval Office, in the private dining room overlooking the South Lawn, Vice President Cheney joined President Bush at a round parquet table they shared once a week. Cheney brought a four-page text, written in strict secrecy by his lawyer. He carried it back out with him after lunch.

In less than an hour, the document traversed a West Wing circuit that gave its words the power of command. It changed hands four times, according to witnesses, with emphatic instructions to bypass staff review. When it returned to the Oval Office, in a blue portfolio embossed with the presidential seal, Bush pulled a felt-tip pen from his pocket and signed without sitting down. Almost no one else had seen the text.