Well, this is one way to get people to read your column

When I saw the headline for the debut column of the New York Times new conservative columnist, Ross Douthat (I shall refrain from making the obvious joke, after all, the man can't help his last name), I was actually starting to miss William Kristol, who would have written a column called "Cheney for President" but he would have been serious.

Douthat writes:

At the very least, a Cheney-Obama contest would have clarified conservatism’s present political predicament. In the wake of two straight drubbings at the polls, much of the American right has comforted itself with the idea that conservatives lost the country primarily because the Bush-era Republican Party spent too much money on social programs. And John McCain’s defeat has been taken as the vindication of this premise.

We tried running the maverick reformer, the argument goes, and look what it got us. What Americans want is real conservatism, not some crypto-liberal imitation.

“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. The former vice-president kept his distance from the Bush administration’s attempts at domestic reform, and he had little time for the idealistic, religiously infused side of his boss’s policy agenda. He was for tax cuts at home and pre-emptive warfare overseas; anything else he seemed to disdain as sentimentalism.

This is precisely the sort of conservatism that’s ascendant in today’s much-reduced Republican Party, from the talk radio dials to the party’s grassroots. And a Cheney-for-President campaign would have been an instructive test of its political viability.

As a candidate, Cheney would have doubtless been as disciplined and ideologically consistent as McCain was feckless. In debates with Barack Obama, he would have been as cuttingly effective as he was in his encounters with Joe Lieberman and John Edwards in 2000 and 2004 respectively. And when he went down to a landslide loss, the conservative movement might – might! – have been jolted into the kind of rethinking that’s necessary if it hopes to regain power.

I disagree with Douthat that having Dick Cheney as the Republican nominee would have been good for the country, for reasons that I think I made clear the last time I actually had time to write a post. You see, I don't put anything past Dick Cheney when it comes to retaining power, and I think it's quite possible that we would have seen some kind of false flag operation, or another stolen election. Because yes, Cheney really is that evil. In fact, I tend to wonder just how many moles he has inside the CIA even as we speak, ready to destroy the racially incorrect whippersnapper who currently occupies the White House if the latter dares to undo too much of the wingnut dream that Cheney spent eight years building.

It's a neat trick that Douthat does here, of course, because the real point of his column is to advocate against prosecuting the Bush Administration for its war crimes, which he does in one sentence buried deep in the column. But if what he was trying to do here was jump up and down like the new kid in class shrieking "Hey, lookit me!", he's succeeded admirably.