Time Magazine may have seen fit to put the be-wigged visage of Hollywood's surliest bastard on its cover last week, but it's this week's Newsweek that shows us the real life Master and Commander: Vice President Dick Cheney.

The story, by Mark Hosenball, Michael Isikoff, and Evan Thomas is so scary, I half wonder why Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker didn't run it on Halloween. Tales of Cheney's monomania on Iraq, his "free floating power base," his near-clinical paranoia, his incredible influence on the President and the direction of foreign policy, the fact that he's "far to the right politically," and the most frightening reference to Thomas Hobbes you will see all year add up to the thesis posited by Hosenball, Isikoff, and Thomas: Cheney is a "vice president who may be too powerful for his own good."

What they don't say—but what hangs over the piece—is the addition: He may be too powerful for our own good, too.

If you don't have time to read the Newsweek piece—c'mon, you can print it out and read it on your ride home—at least read Maureen Dowd's summary from today's Times. You owe it yourself and to your country.