Maddow's plucky enthusiasm for boring things is part charming (stimulus!) and part annoying (card check!), but her unhinged fervor last night for a supposed Barack Obama's smackdown of Dick Cheney was actually sort of creepy.

Maddow's overheated fangirl hyping has a political motivation—she wants Cheney back, and bad. He gives great villain, and the more newsbites there are comparing Cheney's latest angry mumblings to Obama's articulate, measured response the better. Which is why Republicans are openly and publicly imploring Cheney to make like an innocent German Muslim who is unlucky enough to share a common name with an Al Quaeda suspect and disappear.

Cheney called Obama a limp-wristed terrorist two weeks ago. And on Sunday, Obama responded in an interview with 60 Minutes' Steve Kroft, stunning the Washington establishment by calling the former vice president a "knucklehead cracker" and revealing that he had hired a crime-scene clean-up crew to disinfect Cheney's old West Wing office before he moved in. Kidding! He actually said, "I fundamentally disagree with Dick Cheney," and he sounded kind of sleepy when he said it.

To Maddow's ears, though, it was the blistering, fire-and-brimstone, red-faced tirade that she delivers to Cheney in her mind each night as she argues herself to sleep, full of "righteous indignation" and "seething resentment."