Eric Cantor: Boehner 's Dick Cheney

WITH SO MUCH media attention directed at Rep. Eric Cantor's back- channel influence on House Majority Leader John Boehner's teetering debt policy, it's reasonable to suggest that Cantor , the House whip and No.2 man under the speaker, has evolved into Boehner's Dick Cheney. Cantor, who has praised the Tea Party as the "surge protector" against big government, is getting cozier each day with the teabaggers in his hard line against compromise with President Obama. Still, as an overreaching zealot he is more troublesome to Capitol Hill Republicans than he is to the president, who happens to be much savvier than Cantor and will take the Virginia congressman to school in the the current debate.

Cantor has been here before. A rabid Zionist, he didn't hesitate to publicly endorse Israeli hardline prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu when the latter arrived in Washington to express his deep differences with Obama on Middle East policy. Cantor told him: "I'm with you, not my president" and promised that the majority House Republicans would "serve as a check on the administration."

He's probably guaranteeing the Tea Party the same allegiance in his attempt to guide Boehner away from any kind of deal on raising the debt limit. In his own misguided way to keep Boehner in tow, he's making life miserable for a lot of people in and out of government. But in the end he will find that life can get just as miserable for opportunists scheming their way to the executive suite. Even conservatives like David Brooks and the editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal are finding little to cheer about in the mess that the Republicans are creating for the country. It's a bit premature for Cantor to take a bow for his own self-absorbed work on Capitol Hill to educate his colleague John Boehner in the demands of the Ranting Right.