While Condoleezza Rice is busy doing bicep curls, her State Department underlings are doing heavy lifting in the gossip department. For some reason, lately we’ve received a fair amount of State-related scuttlebutt. Here are some highlights.

A tipster tells us: “The U.S embassy in Sudan held a private dinner at their residence. [U.S. Charge d'Affaires] Cameron Hume was dropping the usual comments about the Sudanese goverment. A couple of Sudanese businessmen — incidentally, they don’t support the GOS whatsoever — felt he was being over the top. One told the ambassador that his comments were inflammatory and did nothing to foster better relations between the two countries. This is where it gets good. Apparently the man has a temper. So he said that they were like the businessmen in Nazi Germany and they indirectly supported the regime. They told him that his tone wasn’t acceptable. This is where it gets better. He told them to ‘Run tell your goverment and your Prophet too.’”

OH NO HE DIN’T!!! And did he draw a cartoon of the Prophet too? (If you think we’re making this up, the broad outlines of the story are confirmed by this news account.)

Additional gossip — concerning Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick and the infamous Pamela Willeford, Ambassador to Switzerland and Dick Cheney hunting partner — appears after the jump.

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Last week, we gave you the inside scoop on Dick Cheney’s “tight hole operations.” And yesterday, we shared with you the ten questions about “tight hole operations” that we submitted to Jeff Gannon. We know that the suspense over what he wrote in response is killing you — so here it is:

Your questions are funnier than any answer I could give. I do appreciate the opportunity, however. Please keep in touch, Jeff Gannon.

Yes, we’re as disappointed as you are by Gannon’s gracious, good-humored, but non-humorous response. What are we going to do now?

We’ll do what we do best here at Wonkette: make stuff up!

After the jump, our manufactured responses to the “tight hole operations” questions we posed to Jeff Gannon.

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Shortly after we issued our initial report on Vice President Dick Cheney’s “tight hole operations,” an irate Wonkette reader emailed us: “You did a story on ‘tight hole operations,’ and you didn’t ask Jeff Gannon for comment! What’s up with that? You guys are no Ana Marie Cox.”

Eager to remedy this journalistic lapse, we emailed Mr. Gannon with ten questions about “tight hole operations” — which you can read for yourself, after the jump.

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* Reliable Source: Bill Clinton and Alan Greenspan lunched at the Four Seasons. . . Mike McCurry admits apathy on the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes drama. [WP]
* Under the Dome: Sen. Jim Talent (R-Mo.) turns against his roommate, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), over stem cell legislation. . . Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) has heard every boner joke. . . Senators to star in “comedic whodunit” production for charity. [The Hill]
* Rush & Molloy: Cheney may have been trying to cover up the presence of Pamela Willeford, ambassador to Switzerland, at the hunt. [NYDN]