The indictment of the vice president's chief of staff for perjury and obstruction of justice is an occasion to consider just how damaging the long public career of Richard Cheney has been to the United States.

Bill Bradley has been on a sustained drive, blowing past Vice President Gore.

Sentence first, verdict afterwards.

The question of whether the vice president was involved, we'll probably never know. But it was pretty close to him,

According to his brother Stanislaus . . . 'Unhappiness was like a vice.' He was cold and distant except with those closest to him, but when, on his mother's death, he discovered a bundle of letters that his father had written to her before they were married, he spent the whole afternoon reading them 'with as little compunction as a doctor or a lawyer . . . puts questions.' When he had finished, Stanislaus asked him: 'Well?' 'Nothing,' James Joyce answered curtly and rather contemptuously. Nothing, thought Stanislaus, for the young poet with a mission, but clearly something for the woman who had kept them all those years of neglect and poverty.

What they are going to notice is, at the end of the show, did the show do justice to the story?