"Was the Sun taken over by the Onion?"

Nietzsche once quipped that if you gaze long enough into a deep, dark abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

The New York Sun ruminates on why Dick Cheney should throw his hat in the ring. Apparently they believe that nothing brightens the eyes of primary voters like staring down a man who has substituted a menacing black hole for his soul:

This year, the leading Republican candidates include Senator McCain, who was Mr. Bush’s rival in a bitter 2000 primary contest and who voted against some of Mr. Bush's tax cuts, and Mayor Giuliani, who is going around proclaiming, in what seems a rebuke of George W. Bush, "it's time now that we have a president that knows how to get things done." Were Mr. Cheney in the race, it's hard to imagine that the president's approval ratings would not be five or 10 points higher. The reason is that the administration would have a defender on the campaign trail as part of the public debate.

Well, I don’t want to quibble over P.R. here – public image, despite the best efforts of our most unscrupulous salesmen, remains quite securely in the eye of the beholder. But it seems to me that Cheney’s image as a creepy Machiavellian has been carefully manufactured in order to make him a lightning rod for the mistakes and the overweening of the Administration as a whole. Nobody trusts him, and nobody was ever meant to.

But then, I’m no good with sarcasm. Will somebody tell me if the Sun editors are…serious?