Dana Milbank is a great political columnist at the Washington Post. He flavors his writing with a hilarity and mockery not usually found in the Post's newsy pages (though certainly found in the Style section). We fear the Washington Post will lose him to The Daily Show any minute now.

Last week, David Addington was the subject of Milbank's Washington Sketch. Addington is chief of staff and former legal counsel to VP Dick Cheney. He replaced Scooter Libby after Libby's fall from grace. Addington is a Duke law grad and "the most powerful man you've never heard of."

He's also mean and scary, judging from these exchanges during his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last week:

Could the president ever be justified in breaking the law? "I'm not going to answer a legal opinion on every imaginable set of facts any human being could think of," Addington growled.

Did he consult Congress when interpreting torture laws? "That's irrelevant," he barked.

Would it be legal to torture a detainee's child? "I'm not here to render legal advice to your committee," he snarled. "You do have attorneys of your own."

The dialogue reminds us of arguing with a precocious, but mean-spirited, 10-year-old. Except this one has a lot of power. And helped determine the country's policies for torturing detainees. More scary Addington after the jump.