Dick Cheney discovers magical new fourth branch of government

The best-friend-shootingest Vice President in US History is back to his old tricks this week, as he has apparently discovered/decided that his office is a new fourth branch of government, the one that the Founding Fathers wrote about at length in the Constitution, but that nobody had ever really noticed before. Kind of like in one of those movies that has a part that you think is the end, only it's not really the end, except you stopped watching when you thought the end happened and so you missed the real end. That's Cheney's view of the fourth branch, I guess. Everyone got so excited by the whole Bill of Rights thing that they stopped reading right before the fourth branch was mentioned.

Washington, D.C. — The Oversight Committee has learned that over the objections of the National Archives, Vice President Cheney exempted his office from the presidential order that establishes government-wide procedures for safeguarding classified national security information. The Vice President asserts that his office is not an “entity within the executive branch.”

That's pretty brazen. I mean, he's literally within the executive branch--he works out of the freaking White House. Second, he reports to the guy who is the head of the Executive Branch. What the hell is he talking about?