I've been riveted by the four-part series on Dick Cheney that the Washington Post is running this week. Finally, someone seems to have shed some light into the dark recesses of the veep's operations.

The situation with Cheney--and with politics in the U.S. generally--is so grave that I have to distract myself with something amusing after thinking about it for any length of time. So I decided to look at my library of Richard M. Nixon books and see what our late President had to say about the current vice-president.

As it turns out, Monica Crowley recorded what Nixon had to say about Dick Cheney in her book, Nixon Off the Record. In the following conversation, Nixon is weighing the chances of various future GOP candidates. RN says:

Cheney is smart as a whip and would probably be a responsible and strong president, but I don't know if he is likable enough--you know, with the personality--to be elected. Besides, he's another one who skipped out on Vietnam.

That's so precious. You have to really be scraping the bottom personality-wise for Richard Nixon to be looking down on you in the likability department. But if you read the Washington Post articles, it looks as though the GOP found a way to get around Cheney's personality issue.

Although Nixon never offered his opinion on Paris Hilton, his words sprang to mind recently as I was considering her current prison plight. I went out with Joe and the Cute Little Red-Headed Girlfriend a few weeks ago for Gay Pride to see some comedians and it seemed like every joke was at Paris's expense. It was such a dramatic turnaround from just two years ago, when I blogged about Paris serving as Grand Marshall for that year's Pride March. I don't know Paris personally, but if I did, I would share with her these words of wisdom from our 37th president: "Only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain."