Well, that settles it. Maureen Dowd thinks Dick Cheney should shut up. Cheney, she writes, is "batty," has "numskull ideas," and "still loves torture."

Just as Jeb Bush and other Republicans are trying to get kinder and gentler, Cheney has popped out of his dungeon, scary organ music blaring, to carry on his nasty campaign of fear and loathing.

Cheney, she concludes, "has replaced Sarah Palin as Rogue Diva."

Oh, snap.

All of this, we are told, is hurting Republicans. "It is very difficult for me to understand how the continued presence of Dick Cheney in the public eye could be helping the Republican Party at all," wrote Joshua Tucker, a professor at New York University, on Politico in response to a question about whether Cheney is helping Democrats or Republicans.

As of late March, Gallup was reporting that Cheney still had phenomenally high negative approval ratings (63 percent) and phenomenally low positive approval ratings (30 percent), which is basically where those marks were a year earlier. For now at least, it seems that the more he talks, the more of a gift it is to the Democratic Party (and Democratic Party fundraisers!), and the harder it will make it for the Republican Party to put its disastrous results in the 2008 elections behind it.

Others on the left, though, want Cheney to keep talking. "As long as he remains the public face of the Republican Party, it will remind voters of why they elected Obama," wrote Darrell West, a vice president at the

If they do, Cheney should accept. He's not only changing the debate about U.S. national security policy, he's winning it.

Since the first days of the Obama administration, Cheney has been publicly warning about the consequences of rolling back Bush administration war on terror policies. "When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry," he said in an interview with Politico, published just two weeks after he left office. He added: "The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I'm not at all sure that that's what the Obama administration believes."

The Obama administration eagerly engaged him. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs has regularly taken shots at the former vice president from the podium. When Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes interviewed Obama for a program that aired March 22, he assumed--correctly--that Obama would be eager to take on Cheney.

STEVE KROFT: One question about Dick Cheney and Guantánamo. I'm sure you want to answer this.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Oh, absolutely.

STEVE KROFT: A week ago Vice President Cheney--said essentially that your willingness to shut down Guantánamo and to change the way prisoners are treated and interrogator--interrogated--was making America weaker and more vulnerable to another attack. And that--the interrogation techniques that were used at Guantánamo were essential in preventing another attack against the United States.

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