The joke’s over; bring back Bush. Better yet, bring back Cheney.

I am a big fan of Dick Cheney. Despite his awful domestic spending record, overall W was a good President, but I wish that Cheney had been President. Truly I wish that he were President now—or Vice-President, for that matter. Cheney (along with Rumsfeld, whose defense policies the current administration is partly adopting, but for the wrong reasons) was the no-nonsense adult on whom people could count to make the tough decisions. He was the Cardinal Wolsey to W’s (young) Henry VIII. While others might pose and posture, he said and did what he thought was correct, let the chips fall where they may. He is currently the one guy among the Republicans who seems to be willing to take on the Democrat smear and distortion machine to protect his good name and that of the previous administration, while W is off doing the debate circuit with Bill Clinton.

Ross Douthat wishes that Cheney had been the Republican presidential nominee instead of John McCain. Douthat believes that a losing Cheney candidacy would have forced conservatives to face the fact that it was their principles, not John McCain’s ideological squishiness that has caused Republican electoral losses. Moreover, it would have forced Obama and the Democrats actually to face a serious national security debate. On the issue of conservatism, Douthat fits the Atlantic/New York Times mold of the Upper West Side’s version of elite “sensitive” and “restrained” conservatism. Hence his disapproving definition of the “other” conservatives:

“’Real conservatism,’ in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation.”

“Supply-side economics.” In the investment-encouraging, low-tax sense, check. “Stress positions.” In certain stressful terrorism-preventing intelligence gathering quests, check. “Uninterested in social policy.” As far as the soft totalitarianism of more laws and regulations from the nanny state, check. No wonder I like Cheney.

I share Douthat’s sentiment about a Cheney candidacy, but for the much more basic reason that I think Cheney would have done as well as McCain did, if not better, in the election. Certainly he would have been better at motivating the base and increasing the turn-out among those conservatives who stayed home. But Douthat is right that the debate about the commitment to the defense of the U.S. might have been joined sooner.

Now, some of the faint of heart and shell-shocked Republican survivors in Congress want the vice-president to stop attacking Obama (or, as I see it, to stop defending himself against the attacks on the Bush administration that Obama has launched). While the media now harrumph that it is unseemly for prior office-holders to criticize their successors, I do not recall similar clucking over “bad form” when Bill Clinton and, in far more deranged fashion, Al Gore attacked the Bush administration’s policies. It is not difficult to go to YouTube to uncover anti-Bush rants by Al Gore. And did I mention Jimmy Carter? Moreover, If one looks at Cheney’s interview with Sean Hannity, he is actually quite restrained in his criticism and attempts to keep his eye on policies, not personalities. Unlike what others did to him and Bush. Did I mention Jimmy Carter?

A must read: A blog post that completely expresses my thoughts about Cheney. Via Mark Steyn come some gay (only relevant because of the false liberal mantra that no self-respecting homosexual would say anything positive about a Republican) Democratic die-hard Hillary supporters who express their respect for Cheney and their regret that he is not in office. A sample:

“And Cheney never needed to be babysat. Whenever he said strange things on television, there was clearly an alternative motive at work. Most of his oddball appearances on the Sunday morning shows were so ballsy that even though they often made steam shoot out of our ears at the time, we laughed at how utterly brazen and in your face they were.  Cheney was the master of the F-U, in a way we doubt we’ll ever see in politics again.  When one reporter, in March of last year, told Cheney that 3/5 of Americans thought the Iraq War wasn’t worth it, Cheney said, ‘So?’.

Great Merciful Zeus, that’s ballsy. Refreshingly so.

Joe Biden would have said something memorably ridiculous in response to the same question, but more likely than not he would have made up crazy nonsensical things, and contradicted himself as he stumbled and rambled his way to commercial.”

Read the whole thing. Compare Cheney with Biden (or Obama) and imagine trying to prevent the next terrorist attack on the U.S. Whom among them do you want to be doing the heavy lifting?