There’s one man who possesses all the skills and experience to get the BP spill under control. Love him or hate him, Dick Cheney is the man. He’s steered an oil services company (Halliburton). He’s been Secretary of Defense, proving he knows how to manage huge endeavors such as Operation Desert Storm. And he takes a heart attack the way the rest of us knock back a shot of Jack Daniel’s, with a wince and a smile.

In all seriousness, I propose that the White House nominate Mr. Cheney to the post of Cleanup Czar. It would be a bold move, one that reaches across the aisle, shows decisiveness, and is more likely to succeed than anything tried to this point. It would also send the columnists chattering all day long.

Certainly Mr. Cheney has strong ties to the oil industry. His friends would lend him a hand not only out of personal friendship and national duty, but because when Cheney says, “Jump!” the answer is “How high?” Obama, on the other hand, hires Nobel Prize winners who need a consensus of the professorial class to decide what type of coffee to make — regular or decaf? In the meantime, the oil spews, kills the wildlife, and ruins the economy.

No doubt Obama’s dithering creates an ever-growing crisis that serves his political agenda. To a point. It’s now become apparent that the public has finally woken up to the nightmare that crisis exploitation leads to greater misery. Hiring Cheney would put the genie back in the bottle by Obama demonstrating he actually wants to fix the problem. Then, when the leak is plugged and the mess cleaned up, he could give Mr. Cheney a meritorious service medal showing all the magnanimity of the gracious monarch he is.

The oil spill is only one problem where Cheney’s assistance would prove invaluable. One visit by the former Vice President to the Arizona border and the illegals will stop in their tracks, reverse course, and take every cousin with them. Of course, there won’t be any praise from Mexico’s president at a ballroom bash the likes of which no one has seen since Louis XIV ruled France. Cheney is a nuts and bolts sort of guy. He crushes the problem by giving no quarter and taking no prisoners. Obama does the same thing, but only when a general has a few lagers and lets his tongue wag.

Therein lies one more lesson for Obama to learn from Dick Cheney: how to maintain a thick skin. Slings and arrows were fired at the Vice President from day one until the present day. They glanced off like raindrops on a duck’s ass. He knew better than to rise to the stupidity of the ignorant and/or ill-informed except for that one time when he told a congressman to “blank” off. And even that incident shows you don’t want to tangle with a guy who says what he means and means what he says.

Sadly, Obama is too small a person to seek real solutions. He gorges himself on power, taking bigger and bigger bites without ever chewing the one he has. Eventually the house of cards will topple and Obama will be back to Harvard where sympathy abounds for failure. By contrast, Cheney knows that results count and that sympathy can be found in the dictionary between the slang term for feces and syphilis.

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