Since The Smoking Gun managed to obtain and publish Vice President Cheney’s standard “tour” rider — a list of required items and conditions for any hotel suite Cheney will be using on the road — much has been made of the stipulation that all televisions must be “tuned to Fox News” before the Big Guy arrives.

Danziger, for one, has effortlessly captured both the anti-intellectual and the weirdly narcissistic aspects of this requirement:

But if you click over to the reproduction posted at TSG, you’ll notice something just as intriguing near the bottom: scrawled in over the standard form is a request for “Newspapers — New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, local papers,” and then, yes, what looks suspiciously like “Wash. Post.”

In other words, the closeted image that Cheney and Bush have been so forward in projecting — declaring that they never read the papers, and get all their news from Fox — is as authentic as the Healthy Forests Initiative.

Cheney reads the papers, clearly compulsively. Even the Washington Post. Which is to say he’s read all of the brutal editorials they’ve run about his energetic support for allowing torture by the CIA, and other US forces.

Like the one on October 26, 2005, where they dubbed him “The Vice President of Torture.” The one where they wrote, and we quote, “As for Mr. Cheney: He will be remembered as the vice president who campaigned for torture.”

It doesn’t matter if you’re the Vice President of the United States of America. It doesn’t matter if you’re sitting with your socks off in 68 degree comfort, drinking your pre-positioned Diet Caffeine Free Sprite. If you read that about yourself in the country’s premier political newspaper, it hurts.

As well it should.