Eye of the Beholder? From AP:

President Bush should consider dumping Vice President Dick Cheney from the Republican ticket this year, an influential former GOP senator said Wednesday.

Care to take a guess at who Mr. Emphasis Added might be? Write your guess on a piece of paper, and don't show it to anyone yet.

Alfonse D'Amato said Bush should consider putting Secretary of State Colin Powell or Sen. John McCain of Arizona on the GOP ticket.

There was no immediate comment from the Bush-Cheney campaign.

Yes, it's Senator Pothole, Al D'Amato! You remember how influential Al D'Amato is, right? Remember how Bush made that now-famous trip to kiss his ring back in 1999, before running for president?

Oh, who are we kidding. Al D'Amato was a pork-barrel Republican in a Democratic state who may have rolled a few logs in Congress, but was not exactly electoral dynamite. He wasn't asked to be on any presidential tickets, for example, thanks to what you might call a shaky ethics record. Newsday used to call him the "master of plausible deniability."

Anyhow, it just goes to show you that anytime a politician, no matter how thoroughly beaten or disgraced, wants to criticize his own party, the press will dredge him up as a "repected and influential" former whatnot.