He probably keeps them hidden in his latest copy of Swank.

you could break yourself of the habit of referring to yourself in the first-person plural?

You are neither the Pope nor a monarch - at least as far as I know - and even the New Yorker dropped this particular literary mannerism years ago.

Reading a phrase like "By the time we awoke and opened the paper" when a person is referring to himself is unsettling.

Oh - give me a break. We could spend days cataloging all the terrible, power-hungry, cruel, and unlawful acts Dick Cheney has engaged in.

Who cares if he cuts out newspaper articles, annotates them and keeps them for later reference? I think many intelligent, thoughtful people do that. In fact, I do that. It's probably the least creepy thing I've ever read about Cheney.

Keep your eye on the ball. Don't get distracted by this nonsense.

This is the man who wears the permanent sinister half-smirk. Who shot a good friend, the one who ended up apologizing for it. Who didn't bother to tell his boss about it for a couple days. Whose own daughter could not quit his re-election campaign despite not only his political posture but his personally-held belief that "her kind" only deserves to exist as a lesser member of society. Who disappears for weeks on end to God knows where for purposes wtf. Whose ticker refuses to quit despite every reason it should have years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if he's also using the penknife to cut up the afterbirth from albino 10-toed bat fetuses, spearing then salting every piece before popping them in his mouth.

Strangely, Cheney may have just given hope to all of us who write the ocassional Op-Ed or letter to the editor in the hopes that someone in power will read, think about it, and perhaps slightly shift public policy as a result. Sadly, the snippit on Cheney's mysterious reading habits carry more than a hint of the sinister. It would be interesting to know if the articles colonizing his desk are collected for more than retributive purposes.

See Dick, playing with his balls. the man is certifiable, and a war criminal.

Underlining hot words in red ink and cutting out articles to ponder them are two very different things.

The first is, indeed, creepy - it shows the sort of fanatical right-wing trait I've occassionally seen too.

Sort of the person fueled on hate, the real ideologue, a fanatic.

I cute out articles for future reference, too, e.g., a Paul Krugman column which makes an especially good point.

One difference, I have a box full of such articles, and don't really get around to reviewing them. That makes my method less useful than Cheney's, who actually uses the articles.

It's a bit much to say that a guy who has the position Cheney does - VP, virtual president - is 'obsessive' for paying a lot of attention to the newspapers. Presidents often do, too, IIRC Kennedy read several papers in the morning - and often called them to complain about something they wrote.

Now if there was any justice Cheney would accidentally stab himself in the face with that penknife of his.

So who is numero uno?

In my mind, as I read this article, I was picturing Cheney scrawling "Strawberries..... is he the one who took my strawberries? I can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt and with... geometric logic... that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox DID exist" in the margin's of Wilson's op-ed.

I find it a bit odd that someone as powerful as Cheney with access to so many resouces would personally obsess over, excuse me, ponder over individual articles. Here is someone at the top of the Executive branch who is expected to see the big picture and he singles out single articles from the ten of thousands that are published each day? If I were in his position and were interested on a particliar subject - like Joe Wilson's public statements and public reaction to it - I would tell my chief of staff to have someone assigned to going through Lexis Nexis, do a count of various positions, and write me an executive summery of what has been said and what the response to it overall. I would not waste my time on personally looking for the infomation, much less try to formulate policy based upon an article or two. This is just bad management. If this is how Cheney spends his time, it is no wonder that our country is in such crappy shape and no wonder Haliburton faired so poorly under his management. (They didn't start doing well until after he became VP and they started getting plum no bid contracts.) Seems like Cheney has moved way beyond his level of incompentence.

do the reading and thinking...

...and then there's the Decider.

While "Big Time Dick" is amusing himself with a pen knife and creating a list of people who he would like to see burned alive, our Decider sits, his mind as empty as his unburdened desk, waiting for someone to come and give him something to decide on.

But, I am a serial killer (that's how they caught me, in fact, they found out I cut articles out of the paper, it's CRAAAZZZYYYY)

Sorry, but WTF, Tim?

A better sign of insanity is referring to yourself in third person plural, as a previous poster noted.