Sarah Palin is easily the most striking symbol of misplaced political reverence other than Lenin's embarrassingly moldering mummy in Moscow, but a key to her odd popularity may be an indication her nomination represents a return to sidekick status for the vice presidency: After the last eight years, even Republicans must be thinking whatever else she is or isn't, at least she's not Dick Cheney.

The current Vice President has put an unprecedented stamp of authority - even authoritarianism - on the office, so much so that a following act with Palin seems comparable to Shirley Temple getting handed the office keys of Lavrenti Beria. Cheney's slash-and-burn administrative style and all-out "Presidentialism" quest has made for uneasiness on both sides of the aisle.

Where Cheney is avuncular and Sidney Greenstreet-sinister, Palin's apple-cheeked freshness and substitute-teacher karma is quite a relief - even among voters who ordinarily wouldn't dream of voting for her and ticket partner John McCain. That may sweeten attraction among recalcitrant "womyn warriors" and PUMAs prowling Democrat back trails, still smarting over a primary "stolen" from Hillary Clinton, even though a sit-down with ABC's Charlie Gibson last week proved Palin had all the executive-policy acumen of a raw chickpea.

The downside of this, for anyone wanting the country to veer away from any further avoidable catastrophes, is that Palin's seeming malleability makes her irresistable to neoconservatives, who see her as an empty vessel into which they can pour their own agenda-warped worldview and policy priorities, especially on Middle Eastern issues.
She has been thoroughly drilled by the American Israeli Public Action Committee, and has proclaimed her absolute fealty to all things Zionist-centric when it comes to American action or inaction in the Levant, even though her presence thus far apparently isn't much of a factor with individual Jewish voters.

On that new neoconservative cause celebre', the Georgia/Russia dustsup, The Nation's Mark Ames charts just how closely her global attention tracks that of such neocon bulwarks as The Weekly Standard, and what the dismal ramifications may be:

"Last Friday, after hearing Palin say she was ready for war with Russia, I got on the phone and called some leading Georgian figures. Right away, it became clear to me why the neocons and Sarah Palin don't want you to know what the Georgians think about their plans for Georgia.

"'If America goes to war against Russia, that would mean nuclear war," said a bewildered Alexander Rondeli, president of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies..."

Whether Palin's policy indoctrinations will amount to a hill o' beans in a McCain presidency - or, realistically, whether Joe Biden's educated opinions will in a Barack Obama administration - will be a vital question in a post-Cheney world.

Cheney's impress as the dark prince behind absentee George W. Bush's throne is more than mere grapevine gossip and sense memory. According to volumes of testimony produced in and out of the administration, the Vice President was a true revolutionary in office, one who almost obsessively worked to tip traditional shared balance of federal power to the Oval Office, where it would be used in omniscient exclusivity to accomplish nothing less than a global overhaul to American corporate standards.

It was from Cheney's office that a profound, overt contempt emanated for Congressional and judicial authority and oversight. In concert with a negligent Congress and frequently sympathetic courts, the administration began to act as sole agent of American policy both at home and abroad. In exercising "plenary powers", the American presidency was to become a plenipotentiary of the other two branches of government, assuming their Constitutionally prescribed purviews, as well as any initiatives implicit in their offices.

Nowhere has this consolidation of power been more apparent than in the prosecution of our jerky, haphazard "war on terror" launched in the wake of the 9/11 and anthrax attacks in 2001. According to the plenary-power theory, responding to the terror crisis required Presidential capacity to bend if not break traditional and Constitutional legal guarantees

Under Bush, and usually originating with Cheney and counsel David Addington, kidnap and torture have been certified as legitimate investigative tools; the Geneva Convention rules of warfare, especially with regard to prisoners, have been jettisoned; and any authorization for the use of military force has been used as sanction for deeply enmeshing the nation in apparently intractable wars in Iraq and Afghanista. Cheney's office also functions as megaphone for battle cries aimed at Iran and Syria.

He helped promote the wide-scale domestic spying program that roiled even Bush's own Department of Justice - not exactly a hotbed of nattering, liberal bleeding-hearts. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft had the screws put to him in a hospital bed when he balked at authorizing the seamy operation.

None of this was lost on members of Cheney's own party, who came to distrust and even despise him for some of the garden paths down which he'd led them. A GOP stalwart no less faithful than ex-House Majority Leader Dick Army was himself gamed at Powerpoint by the Vice President, according to Barton Gellman in his new book, "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency":

"Cheney ... had ... a borrowed hideaway office in the Capitol building," Gellman explained. "He brings Armey in ... and he lays out a big stack of papers and says, 'Let me explain to you what's really going on. ... Saddam is much more dangerous than we want to tell the public.'"

"He told Armey two things that he's never said in public and that are not true," Gellman continued. "He said that Saddam personally, and his family, had direct ties with al Qaeda. And he said that Iraq was making substantial progress towards a miniature nuclear weapon."

At this point, it doesn't matter if Palin or Biden retain the powers accrued the office by current occupant. Or even whether they're the "next Dick Cheney".

Looking back at the past two Presidential terms, one was too many.