Dick Cheney Lied -- to a Republican

Of course, the Wall Street swoon is bigger news. But bigger news as well were the somewhat newsworthy revelations in Bob Woodward's book -- bigger because Woodward is a journalistic celeb who gets to flack his wares on 60 Minutes.

His WashPost colleague Barton Gellman, though, scored the bigger news story, even though his own newspaper didn't seem to think so -- relegating the story to page A19. In his new book on Vice President Cheney, Angler, Gellman reports a new twist on the old story of administration officials trying to tie Saddam Hussein to 9/11, and the most newsworthy thing about the report is the source: former Republican House Majority Leader (and onetime Newt Gingrich ally) Dick Armey:

The threat Cheney described went far beyond public statements that have been criticized for relying on "cherry-picked" intelligence of unknown reliability. There was no intelligence to support the vice president's private assertions, Gellman reports, and they "crossed so far beyond the known universe of fact that they were simply without foundation."

Maybe that's Cheney's new charity, the Without Foundation. But the kicker is Armey's quote:

"Did Dick Cheney . . . purposely tell me things he knew to be untrue?" Armey said. "I seriously feel that may be the case. . . . Had I known or believed then what I believe now, I would have publicly opposed [the war] resolution right to the bitter end, and I believe I might have stopped it from happening."