US Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday “Faced the Nation” and told America he’s here to stay.

“I’ve now been elected to a second term,” Cheney pronounced, as though he alone won the presidency, “and I’ll serve out my term.”

Cheney added that his motives are pure because unlike most vice presidents, he has no presidential designs.

If that’s so, mused CBS interviewer Bob Schieffer, then why not resign and make room for someone who does?

“Nobody has suggested it to me,” was Cheney’s bland response.

Well.

Well, well, well.

Is that all it takes to get rid of Cheney?

Just “suggesting?”

Okay.

Consider it done.

I formally suggest to Cheney that he immediately resign.

Whew, that was easy!

Now, am I on Homeland Security’s “enemies of America” list yet? But more importantly....

....Is he gone yet?

Of course, Cheney won’t resign. He’s worked too hard to place his wife, daughters and son-in-law in high-paying government jobs, and to achieve his vision of America — one of secret courts, secret judges, secret home searches, warrantless eavesdropping on citizenry, holding suspects in endless detention without charging them with crimes, and torturing prisoners.

Few men have the stomach, let alone the sweat glands, for Cheney’s grand vision of America. If Cheney leaves, Bush’s secret empire might just collapse.

Some call Cheney the co-president. To some others he is the Grand Inquisitor. Every ruthless leader suppressing terrorist insurgencies needs one.

Queen Isabella had Tomas de Torquemada, who helped her rid what eventually became Spain of its Jews and Muslims. Under Torquemada’s ruthless, relentless pursuit of Spanish national security, not even conversion or apostasy could “cure” Jews and Muslims of their religious association.

Medieval Spain considered them permanent insurgents. Pre-Spain tried Jews and Muslims in secret courts with anonymous judges, secretly searched their homes, spied on them daily, held them in endless detention without charging them with crimes, exiled, executed, and, most notoriously, tortured them.

But of course, Torquemadas aren’t born every day. People willing to do these things to other people, whether in the name of God or in the name of National Security — America’s new religion — with such efficiency and the glib ability to rationalize their actions and still make eye-contact and witty chit-chat on television, are a rare breed.

Medieval Europe had no United Nations, but there was an Apostolic See, where Pope Sixtus IV noted that Isabella’s Inquisitors “without observing juridical prescriptions” — that’s fancy talk for “following laws and procedures,” like the pre-Cheney constitutional protections you used to get in America when you were accused of crimes — “have detained many persons in violation of justice, punishing them by severe tortures and imputing to them, without foundation, the crime of heresy...that a great number of them have come to the Apostolic See, fleeing from such excessive rigor and protesting their orthodoxy.”

Republicans who want at least a shot at the next presidency hope Cheney will take his fancy Italian hunting rifle and barrel off to that big, baited doves-and-quail-aplenty hunting field in Texas, New Mexico, or his “native” Wyoming.

But Cheney says he won’t go, and it’ll be hard even for the most desperate presidential wanna-be to dislodge from office a man who packs big long heat and, after a couple of fizzy Dr. Peppers and “one beer,” mistakes his best friend and Republican benefactor Harry Whittington for a quivering quail and pumps him full of shot.

I mean, if Cheney thought Whittington was a bird, what will he think Sen. Bill Frist is?

It’s unclear whether Cheney’s departure would boost US President George W. Bush’s approval ratings from the truly dismal, persistent March figures of 37 percent as America’s civil liberties disappear and the war in Iraq drags on with not just high casualties but evidence of sadistic murders — something Cheney tried to obliquely pin on “Zarqawi” in his “Face the Nation” interview — and killings of women and children that transcend simple military error.

Could another person do better?

Why not make way and see?

Certainly Frist’s mouth waters at the prospect.

And it would be a good test of the much-vaunted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s untested mettle.

On “Face the Nation,” Cheney came close to understanding what he must do to save his party. “Bob, you know what this reminds me of?”

Cheney mused when asked about resigning.

“It reminds me of 30 years ago when I was Gerry Ford’s chief of staff and you were the CBS correspondent covering the White House.”

What happened to President Ford when Cheney was his White House chief of staff? He got his yesyesyes kicked by a hayseed governor from Georgia — Jimmy Carter.

Torquemada’s clients were king and queen. He didn’t have to worry about elections. Some Grand Inquisitors have all the luck!