I really have no interest in debating whether Angler is slanted against Dick Cheney. David really says it all. What I do have an interest in is settling a score with an old Cheney staffer, and, in the process, illustrating a small slice of how the Office of the Vice President worked under Dick Cheney.

In 2003, Frank Foer and I worked for months on a profile of Cheney for The New Republic. (Sadly, TNR's web archives are all messed up, but you can read our 7000-word piece from the Dec. 1, 2003 issue of the magazine here.) We interviewed a lot of people for the piece, and at the end of the process, we reached out to Cheney's office. We wanted to check some basic facts, to get their perspective for the piece and to have them respond to some of the criticisms we'd turned up. Pretty basic journalistic fare. Then we met a man named Kevin Kellems.

Kellems was a communications staffer at the Office of the Vice President. He and another colleague, who I won't name because we don't have issues, agreed to set up a conference call with us -- Cheney, alas, wasn't interested in being interviewed -- to answer our questions. We did it on background, meaning we could cite them as Cheney staffers or some such, but not by name. It all seemed helpful enough. With me taping the conversation on our end, we spoke with Kellems and his colleague at length, and he even facilitated further interviews with other Cheney confidantes.

Everything seemed above board. It was fairly clear, I thought, that we would be writing a pretty harsh, critical profile, but we discussed our concerns in the open. Or so I thought.

Shortly after the piece ran, TNR received a letter to the editor from Kellems. (It ran in the Feb. 2, 2004 edition of the magazine, for those of you with Nexis accounts.) And it accused us of being sloppy and lazy -- in fact, professionally deficient. Kellems referred to unspecific "misstatements in the article" that "could have been avoided if the reporters had checked their facts." What Kellems didn't say in the letter is that we checked our facts with him.

How could he get away with this? Because most mainstream news organizations don't have opt-out clauses for grants of anonymity. Knowing this, Kellems was in an excellent position to misrepresent our reporting on our magazine's own letters page. And what's more, because news outlets believe in the right-of-reply, TNR would have been hard-pressed to edit out the bit about checking our facts, lest the Cheneyites further accuse us of papering over a complaint. It all played out as I suspect he'd gambled it would. We responded to Kellems' letter, but didn't say anything about how he used our grant of anonymity as a weapon with which to shank us.

Well, I don't work for TNR anymore, and I don't believe in respecting grants of anonymity for people who act in bad faith. (Kellems went on to work for Paul Wolfowitz, and went to the World Bank with him.)

I hope the broader significance is clear. That sort of hardball is pretty indicative of how the Cheneyites act. Using an institution's rules against it is a clever trick. I would later find out just how bare-knuckled the Cheneyites fight when, in 2005, Patrick Fitzgerald revealed that Scooter Libby responded to a piece that John Judis and I wrote -- in which we quoted a then-anonymous Joe Wilson about his trip to Niger -- by setting in motion the events that outed Valerie Plame.

Is Cheney a singular figure? I leave that for you to judge, and Bart's instant-classic book is an excellent guide. I have to admit I have a certain respect for just how gangster the Cheneyites are. But it stops at a point. You might say that I should hate the game, and not the player. But why choose?