Hail To The Veep

By JONATHAN KARL
July 27, 2007; Page W3

Few people confuse the Washington establishment more than Dick Cheney. Before becoming vice president, he had always been the kind of low-key, pragmatic Republican that Democrats and the press liked. When he served in Congress, he had been a protégé of moderate Republican leader Bob Michel and a member of a group of centrist Republicans known as "the Wednesday group." He was tight with James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, pillars of the realist school of Republican foreign policy. Heck, he had been Gerald Ford's chief of staff. How did this sane, sober voice on foreign policy turn into the Darth Vader of the Bush White House?

Today Mr. Cheney has become the personification of virtually everything people don't like about the Bush administration. He is a war-monger, puppet-master, advocate of torture, manipulator of intelligence and the center of an endless supply of conspiracy theories. As Gen. Scowcroft, his old friend, lamented: "I've known Dick Cheney for thirty years. But I don't know Dick Cheney anymore."

Not long ago, a prominent foreign-policy expert in Washington who has also known Dick Cheney for years told me -- seriously -- that he thought the change could be chemical, that, somehow, when Mr. Cheney had his pacemaker installed in June 2001, it triggered a reaction that affected his brain and drained him of his common sense.

Stephen Hayes doesn't explore the pacemaker theory, but "Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President" is the most serious effort yet to understand the Cheney enigma. Mr. Hayes has an advantage over others who have struggled with this subject: Mr. Cheney actually talked to him, and so did many of his usually tight-lipped advisers. The result is a detailed and sympathetic portrait, but one that will leave Mr. Cheney's erstwhile friends still confused.

'Warm and Fuzzy'

Mr. Hayes finds more consistency than change in Mr. Cheney's positions and style over the years. For one thing, Mr. Cheney's temperament was moderate but his politics never were. "I had a very conservative voting record, more conservative than most people realized," Mr. Cheney says. "The press never looked at my voting record. They thought I was all warm and fuzzy and they never looked to see."

There is one important theme on which Mr. Cheney has been especially consistent, a matter that has animated much of his work as vice president: preserving, if not expanding, the power of the presidency. This has been something of an obsession for Mr. Cheney going back to his early days in the Ford administration. He urged President Ford to fight proposed reforms to the CIA coming out of the Church Committee because they amounted to "legislative encroachment on executive power." It was an argument he would make over and over again during the course of his career. In the early 1990s, when he was defense secretary during the first Gulf War, he argued, unsuccessfully, that the president should not seek congressional authorization to use force. The president, he said, is the commander in chief and Congress "a great debating society."

And he has never been shy about threatening military force. In 1980, while he was just a freshman member of the House, Mr. Cheney criticized President Carter's handling of the Iranian hostage crisis with words that seem to perfectly reflect his approach to the current stand-off over Iran's nuclear program. "My major criticism is [President Carter's] repeated public statements that he will not use force to resolve the situation," Mr. Cheney told a local paper in Wyoming. "Although he might decide not to use force, he should not make his decision known. Once you remove the threat of force you remove any incentive for the Iranians to free the hostages."

Vice President Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld brief President Gerald R. Ford in the Oval Office.

Still, Mr. Cheney's old friends can't understand how the longtime realist could become a central player in a foreign policy dedicated to the idea of promoting democracy. In the past, Mr. Cheney took a realpolitik approach to dealing with tyrants in the Middle East, emphasizing stability and access to oil, not human rights and democracy. He opposed overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 1991, for example, saying: "The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many."

Mr. Cheney tells Mr. Hayes why his views on Saddam in particular, and the Middle East in general, have shifted so dramatically. "Americans weren't going to die based on who was governing in Iraq or most other places over there," he says. "That changed on 9/11." But Mr. Hayes also suggests that Mr. Cheney's support for the "reform process" in the Middle East falls short of President Bush's notion that the U.S. can or should spread democracy around the world. "Cheney is a cautionary voice on the prospects for democratic reforms," he writes.

Mr. Hayes put the question directly to President Bush: Is Mr. Cheney as "passionate" about democratic reform as you are? "There's no question that he brings a kind of -- a caution about -- of being unrealistic about how fast democracy can take hold in certain societies," Mr. Bush replied. He stammered on for a bit more and then gave up, telling Mr. Hayes: "I'm not sure how to answer the question of how he stands relative to me."

Donald Rumsfeld looms large in the book's early chapters. Without him, it seems, there would be no Dick Cheney. After a rocky first encounter on Capitol Hill when Mr. Cheney was little more than a congressional intern ("I thought he was an arrogant, abrasive young Congressman," Mr. Cheney remembers), Mr. Rumsfeld becomes directly responsible for all Mr. Cheney's big breaks: He hires him for two different jobs in the Nixon administration; when Mr. Rumsfeld becomes President Ford's chief of staff, he makes Mr. Cheney his deputy; later, when Mr. Rumsfeld is named defense secretary, he persuades President Ford to name the 34-year-old Cheney as his replacement. In 10 years, Mr. Cheney goes from being a Yale dropout who is twice arrested for drunk driving to the youngest White House chief of staff in history. It's during these years, as Mr. Rumsfeld's protégé, that Mr. Cheney's political ideology takes form. He becomes like Mr. Rumsfeld, minus the arrogance and abrasiveness.

Mr. Cheney poking fun at his media image in January 2006.

But Mr. Rumsfeld nearly vanishes from Mr. Hayes's narrative during the Iraq war. As the insurgency gained strength in 2005 and 2006, Mr. Hayes suggests, Mr. Cheney became frustrated with a Pentagon war strategy that he believed was too timid. At the time, Mr. Rumsfeld was arguing against sending more troops, saying that we should "take the hand off the bicycle seat" and force the Iraqis to take more responsibility. In the White House, though, Mr. Cheney was pushing for an early "surge." As President Bush tells Mr. Hayes: "Cheney was a more-troops man."

Comic Stories

But did Mr. Cheney ever talk about more troops with Mr. Rumsfeld? Unfortunately, Mr. Hayes doesn't ask him. Mr. Rumsfeld doesn't reappear in his narrative until Mr. Bush decides to fire him in November 2006. It's one of the few Bush decisions that Mr. Cheney is prepared to admit publicly he strongly disagreed with. If Mr. Cheney had any disagreements with Mr. Rumsfeld, they were apparently trumped by personal loyalty. Mr. Cheney calls his long-time mentor "the greatest Defense Secretary in history."

The one area where Mr. Cheney has indisputably changed is in his relations with the press. Mr. Hayes tells some comic stories about the practical jokes that Mr. Cheney used to play on the White House press corps during the Ford years. The reporters liked him, he seemed to get along with them and he received good press -- as chief of staff, congressman and defense secretary. Now Mr. Cheney has cut himself off almost completely from the Washington press corps.

During the 2004 campaign, for example, he refused to give the New York Times a seat on his plane (reporters from major news organizations routinely travel with the president and vice president). The banishment of the Times was not an isolated incident. Mr. Hayes reveals that Mr. Cheney had also ordered his staff to kick AP reporter Laura Meckler off his plane -- in the middle of a trip. Ms. Meckler's transgression was writing a single story that Mr. Cheney felt had twisted his words. The staff gently suggested that it would be a bad idea to leave an Associated Press reporter stranded at a campaign stop. Mr. Cheney agreed to allow her to stay on the plane until he returned to Washington but added: "I don't have time for this s -- t. I don't want her on the plane again."

Mr. Hayes's biography is not entirely uncritical. He portrays Mr. Cheney as "a fanatic for secrecy" and writes that, in the wake of the Valerie Plame case, the vice president's office became "a seedbed of paranoia." Mr. Cheney has never been more isolated. Mr. Hayes quotes former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton, a longtime Cheney admirer, lamenting that Mr. Cheney, who was once widely respected by both parties, rarely talks to Democrats anymore.

Some people dislike Mr. Cheney because he has been effective in pushing policies they disagree with. But even Mr. Hayes's positive portrayal makes it clear that Mr. Cheney's image problem is about more than politics. Secrecy and isolation have come with a price. Conspiracy theorists have filled the void. And that goes a long way toward explaining how a soft-spoken pragmatist, a man once so well-liked, has come to be seen as the Darth Vader of the White House.

Mr. Karl is senior national security correspondent for ABC News.

Dick Cheney in close-up.

It’s historic. It’s unprecedented. Vice President Dick Cheney spoke to Stephen F. Hayes for Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President for 30 hours of interviews. (Who knew he talked that much?) Hayes’s Cheney is a refreshingly fair, unexpectedly candid telling of the life so far of a man who came to conservatism through service; one who serves long after he ever expected to.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: First things first: What’s with this decaf-latte stuff you report? I’d figure Vice President Cheney for black coffee and scotch kinda guy.

Stephen F. Hayes: Me, too. By all accounts, he’s not a big drinker, but he does drink an occasional Scotch (Johnny Walker Red, at least when he’s with his fishing buddies). As surprising as the decaf latte? He likes a glass of white wine and used to be an avid tennis player.


Lopez: Cheney became a conservative by working in government. How did that happen?

Hayes: He saw the federal bureaucracy from the inside. Cheney was the director of operations for Richard Nixon’s Cost of Living Council, the body that drafted the Nixon Administration’s wage-and-price control rules. (Cheney was the typist at the all-night session where the specifics of those regulations were written.) There’s an irony here. I think many people, especially his critics, think of Cheney as “an ideologue.” While he obviously has strong views — and a long voting record as a conservative — it seems to me that he’s more an experiential conservative than an ideological one. Cheney had studied for his PhD in political science and brought to Washington a sort of detached, analytical approach to issues. My sense is that many college graduates or grad students come to Washington to change the world. Cheney, who had co-written an academic article on congressional voting patterns with one of his professors, came to see how things work. And in his early experiences, he saw that more often than not, they didn’t.


Lopez: We know there’s at least one big issue Cheney differs with many conservatives on (a federal marriage amendment). What kind of conservative did he wind up?

Hayes: He’s a pretty traditional western conservative. The government should do very few things, do them well, and otherwise stay out of the way. In a profile written when he became chief of staff in the Ford White House, Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon wrote that Cheney was regarded as a practical conservative “rather than as an ideologue.” Cheney summarized his emerging political philosophy this way: “Basically, I am skeptical about the ability of government to solve problems, and I have a healthy respect for the ability of people to solve problems on their own.”


Lopez: Everyone’s a “Reaganite,” as Cheney himself has said. What does he mean by that?

Hayes: We talked about that in the context of his work in the Ford administration and the elections of 1976 and 1980. Cheney was deputy chief of staff and then chief of staff to Gerald Ford, a moderate. When Ronald Reagan challenged Ford in the Republican primary in 1976, many of Ford’s campaign aides dismissed Reagan as “too extreme.” Ford himself would later say that Reagan was “unelectable” because of his conservative views. Cheney was intensely loyal to Ford, but never shared the disdain many of his colleagues felt toward Reagan and especially toward Reagan’s ideas. At one point shortly before the 1976 GOP convention, Cheney took a secret trip to Camp David with pollster Bob Teeter in an attempt to convince Ford to pick Reagan as his runningmate. And in the campaign brochure he produced for his first run for Congress in 1978, Cheney made Reaganesque arguments for tax cuts and for a leave-us-alone federal government. Despite this gradual turn, many of his colleagues still considered him a “Ford man.” Bob Michel, who was elected the House Republican leader in 1980, encouraged Cheney to run for a leadership position in the House because he thought Cheney was a moderate. “I just thought we were collectively — as a group — we were really so conservative that we needed a moderate.” Michel thought Cheney could “provide a voice of moderation to what was really a right-wing conservative leadership group.” (The news media said the same thing.) But Cheney was already well on his way to being a Reaganite.


Lopez: You quote Cheney having wanted to leave D.C. in 1976. He obviously didn’t. What kept him there? What was most compelling?

Hayes: Ford’s loss in the 1976 election really bothered him. Ford and his campaign team nearly erased a deficit of some 30 points in the final three months before losing a close race. Cheney made a list of all of the things they could have done differently to win and then tore it up. He told me that the experience made him want to run on his own.


Lopez: Richard Bruce Cheney was deputy press secretary for Ted Kennedy?!?

Hayes: Hard to believe, isn’t it? Cheney came to Washington as a congressional fellow and spent the first half of his fellowship working for Representative Bill Steiger, a young Republican from Wisconsin. The fellows were encouraged to work for a new member — in a different chamber — for the second half. Cheney drew an assignment in Kennedy’s office, where he was told he’d be working as deputy press secretary. Although he did not have any ideological objections to working for Kennedy, Steiger had given him a lot of responsibility and Cheney wanted to stay in his office. As it happened, Cheney was friends with Bob Bates, the congressional fellow who worked for Kennedy during the first half of the program and who wanted to stay with the Massachusetts senator. So Cheney paid a visit to Kennedy — just so that he could say he’d done so — and went back to work for Steiger. “I don’t think Kennedy realizes it to this day,” Cheney says.


Lopez: Why is former Congressman Cheney so fond of the House?

Hayes: It was somewhat liberating for him because he was his own man. He was also able to influence debates in the House early, having been elected to leadership after just one term. I think he remembers it as a collegial place, a place where he not only got along with members from both parties, but in some cases became close friends with Democrats. And although his job as vice president makes him president of the Senate, my sense is that he regards of that body as institutionally arrogant and overly stuffy. I think he prefers the less-polished characters that populate the House to the haughtiness of the Senate.


Lopez: Had George Bush decided pretty early on in the campaign that Cheney would be his veep?

Hayes: I’m not sure he decided early, but he certainly had it in his mind. They had a conversation in November 1999 — before the Republican primaries — in which Bush asked Cheney if he’d consider joining the ticket. Bush had been impressed with Cheney during meetings of his campaign’s foreign policy and national security advisers, taking note of the fact that the other big-thinkers in the room seemed to defer to Cheney with some regularity. Later, when Cheney would come in to brief Bush on the vice presidential search in the spring and summer of 2000, Bush would often joke at the end of the sessions that Cheney was the answer to his problems, and the president told me that he had his eye on Cheney throughout that entire process.


Lopez: Is it a co-presidency? Is Cheney the evil genius behind the buffoon Bush?

Hayes: That’s a myth. Without exception, everyone who has worked with the two men say that it’s clear who is in charge. There’s little question that Bush takes Cheney’s advice seriously, but at the end of the day it’s just advice. Cheney is a lot more conservative than Bush. If there had been anything close to a co-presidency I think we would not have seen, for instance, the explosion in spending that the Bush presidency has given us.


Lopez: Dick Cheney was an ardent Rumsfeld loyalist. Was that all loyalty to a guy who brought him along in the political world with him? Or did he really truly think he was the best defense secretary we ever had?

Hayes: Good question. There is no question that Cheney is filled with intense loyalty to Rumsfeld. After all, Rumsfeld was not only his political mentor (and later a good friend), he may have saved Cheney’s career when the FBI raised concerns with President Ford about Cheney’s two DUIs. But the two men were not always in lockstep on issues. Condoleezza Rice told me that Cheney and Rumsfeld disagreed on policy far more often than one might suspect reading news accounts of the administration. “They don’t always see eye to eye on things,” she said. “Not by any means.”


Lopez: You wrote The Connection. Dick Cheney has probably made the best case for the war — explaining how Afghanistan and Iraq are both fronts in the war on terror — of anyone in the administration. Why wasn’t he out there more making the case? Or why wasn’t someone using his talking points?

Hayes: That’s a question that could only come from a conservative. Most of our colleagues in the news media believe that Cheney made the worst case for war. The same people believe that there were no connections between Iraq and al Qaeda, too. One person who had interesting views on both of those subjects was L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in postwar Iraq. Bremer, who is not a Cheney acolyte, was baffled that the White House didn’t use the vice president more. “He’s one of the people in the administration who probably best understands the relationship of what we’re doing in Iraq to the war on terrorism. At least judging from his public statements he understands it very well. Says it, articulates it better than anybody else — than Powell or Rumsfeld or Rice. He really gets it.” I asked Bremer about the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. “I don’t think there’s any question about that…This idea that there was no relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam is just wrong. Flat wrong on the record.”


Lopez: On the “16 Words” controversy: You write, in explaining a Nick Kristof article that contended that the Bush administration lied: “But the truth was considerably more complicated and would take years to unravel entirely.” Has it been?

Hayes: We’re getting there, thanks in no small part to Byron York’s excellent reporting. But those complicated truths are a bit too much to hope for at this point when even the simplest truths have been buried or ignored. For example, most reporters still believe that Joseph Wilson went to Niger and returned to debunk forged documents about an Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. They’re wrong. That didn’t happen. Wilson went to Niger in February 2002 and the U.S. government didn’t receive the forged documents until October 2002. Despite his numerous claims to the contrary, Wilson did not debunk the documents because doing so would have been impossible. And to CIA the analysts who paid attention to what Wilson said upon returning, his report strengthened early intelligence suggesting Iraq’s interest in uranium from Niger. Wilson changed his story only after he was confronted by a keen-eyed investigator from the Senate Intelligence Committee, who understood that his claims could not have been true.

Another example: Senator Carl Levin wrote to the CIA the day after Bush spoke the 16 words in his 2002 State of the Union, asking whether the Agency supported the claim. The CIA responded one month later by defending the intelligence in Bush’s speech, telling Levin “reporting suggest[s] Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium from Niger.” And not only did the CIA back Bush’s claim, it did so in part by pointing to a document based on the “intelligence report on the former Ambassador’s trip to Niger.”

All of which makes much more understandable the eagerness of Cheney and his staff to correct the misimpressions Wilson was sowing in a friendly media.


Lopez: Had he had his way, would Cheney have done Iraq differently?

Hayes: It’s hard to tell. So much of what he thought about how to do Iraq remains a mystery even to those people who served with him at the highest levels of the Bush administration. But there are hints that he would have done some things differently. He told me that he thought establishing the Coalition Provisional Authority was a mistake and that we should have immediately put in place a government of Iraqis.


Lopez: Are there issues you weren’t able to get into in the book that the vice president has a lot of influence over?

Hayes: I was surprised by how candid he was with me on a wide range of subjects, on personal issues as well as his political life and his views on policy. But there were several times he simply cut off conversation on a subject. He wouldn’t discuss the Libby prosecution and anytime I pressed on issues that could have taken us into anything classified he refused to answer.


Lopez: Was it hard to get a man who likes to be behind the scenes to talk to you for thirty-some hours of interviews?

Hayes: I heard probably a dozen times from his friends and colleagues that they were surprised he had agreed to talk to me for the book. And I’m not sure he was eager to do it when I first proposed the idea. But once we got started, he was very easy to talk to. At the beginning of the first book-specific interview, I asked him about his family and what it was like to grow up in Nebraska during the 1940s. I had thought long and hard about starting with such a personal subject because he is so famously private about his family. I think he talked for nearly 30 minutes without interruption, which has to be some kind of Dick Cheney record.


Lopez: The commutation is something, but do you have any indication that the vice president is ticked Scooter Libby has not been given a full pardon?

Hayes: No, I don’t. But I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by speculating — and it is just speculation — that Cheney would like a pardon for Scooter Libby.


Lopez: Some of us wanted Lynne Cheney to be the new senator from Wyoming when there was that opening recently. Why didn’t she ever run for anything? The man hold her back? (I like to sound like a feminist sometimes to throw people off.)

Hayes: Good question, and I don’t know the answer. She has some experience as a candidate. Sort of. When Cheney first ran for Congress, he had a heart attack the summer before the election. His doctor told him to take it easy for several weeks and by all accounts Lynne filled in quite capably.


Lopez: If Dick Cheney could have really been president for a day on Saturday during W’s colonoscopy — and he could have really done whatever the heck he wanted — what do you imagine he might have done?

Hayes: Maybe fly-fishing as president?


Lopez: The vice president really likes his fly fishing, doesn’t he? Did you ever fly fish with Dick Cheney? I assume it’s safer than going hunting with Dick Cheney. (Sorry, Mr. Vice President.)

Hayes: He does. His library at the vice president’s residence is filled with books like Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream and Nymph Fishing for Larger Trout, and I’m reliably informed that he actually reads stuff like that.

Alas, I never got an invitation to fish with him. (And I would have been clueless if I had.)


Lopez: Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney have some colorful history, don’t they? Can we start a Cheney-Gingrich 2008 late-entering ticket rumor right now? How might that go?

Hayes: There would be some pretty intense disagreements over executive power.


Lopez: Is Liz Cheney working for Fred Thompson a sign of whom the vice president may support?

Hayes: I think Liz and her father have very similar views on foreign policy and national security. But I don’t think he’ll support anyone before the Republican nomination is decided.


Lopez: What’s your favorite Cheney story?

Hayes: There are so many interesting stories to choose from. The day after Cheney was sworn in as Secretary of Defense was a Saturday. Cheney was in early. He had important things to do — “you know, figuring out where the restroom was and all that stuff” — and wanted to get a head start on the coming paperwork deluge that would greet him Monday morning. But shortly after he arrived, he was summoned to the White House for a meeting with the president. It was urgent.

Cheney made his way to the elevator located directly in his new office. He punched the button for the garage and waited as he was delivered to his limousine. He stepped out of the elevator. There was no car, there were no people. He was alone in the basement — not where he was supposed to be. He turned to board the elevator to try another floor and faced another problem. There was no call button — a reasonable security measure to keep would-be troublemakers from riding directly from the basement into the secretary’s office — but real trouble for Cheney. He grew impatient as he thought about his dilemma. “It’s a Saturday morning, nobody’s around and the president is waiting for me over in the Oval Office.” After a quick search, he found the stairs that would take him upstairs. He burst through the doors into the garage and through a set of glass doors he took in the chaotic scene outside his limousine: Agents from his security detail were barking out questions to one another — “Where the hell is he? What happened to the secretary?” — and trying to locate the man they were supposed to protect with their lives.

Cheney, amused, wanted to project calm. “I tied my tie and opened the door and walked out like I knew exactly what I was doing,” he says. “And I got in the car and nobody ever had the nerve to ask me, ‘Hey, where the hell were you?’”

“That was my first day on the job. Lost in the basement of the Pentagon.”

Why Vote When You Can Bet?

The Iowa Electronic Markets, the big daddy of the political prediction markets, is consistently better at forecasting winners than pre-election polls. (Read a 2003 Slate "Explainer" about prediction markets here.)
...From now until Election Day 2008, we'll publish regular updates of the key data from Iowa Electronic Markets, Intrade.com, Newsfutures.com, and Casualobserver.net. (Casualobserver has not yet launched its 2008 political prediction market, but we will add it as soon as it goes up.) In these early days of the campaign, we are tracking four markets: 1) Democratic nominee for president, 2) Republican nominee for president, 3) presidential victor, and 4) party control of the presidency. We'll add Senate and House races as they heat up next year.

The Boom Beyond Our Borders: Can China and India maintain their sizzling growth rates?

She's in charge of the Tigers' turf

Heather Nabozny: The first female head groundskeeper (right) in Major League Baseball, gets help preparing the infield for last year's World Series at Comerica Park, home of the Detroit Tigers.

The Fascination With Hell's Fury

Hell Has Played a Role Across Cultures and History, but What Does It Mean Today?

How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life

The Best Dangerous Science Jobs: Hurricane Hunter, Volcanologist

Smog and Mirrors: China's Plan for a Green Olympics

Photograph by Tony Law

Hillary Who? Is there a Clinton in the 2008 race?

...I count a total of 36 references to "Hillary" or its possessive form in a memo of about 1,800 words. When Penn cues up the poll results against her Democratic rivals or the frontrunning Republicans, they are "Obama" and "Edwards" and "Giuliani"; she is "HRC."

Number of times the name "Clinton" appears in the memo: zero.

...the "Clinton" problem is this: the set of associations the name brings to mind when people are reminded of it. I think the extent to which animus toward Bill is a drag on Hillary is seriously overstated: People who can't stand him tend to have a well-formed and free-standing negative impression of her as well. The real problem is the impression of dependence.

Mrs. Clinton is where she is today not incidentally because she married Bill Clinton, but for that reason essentially. It is no disparagement of her skills as a politician to say so. He merely opened the doors; she had to walk through them. But open them he did. The Clinton campaign has every reason to avoid reminding people of the extent to which her political career and prospects derive from his.

The decision to adopt "Hillary" and drop "Clinton" has nothing whatsoever casual to it. It is part of a solution to, or at least an attempt to ameliorate, a genuine problem. Before her, the last person to face a problem along these lines was none other than the current occupant of the White House. The family nickname of the son of George Herbert Walker Bush was not "W" but, ahem, "Junior." That would not do. It took the political skill of Karl Rove to insinuate "Dubya" into public consciousness. (That's what the real insiders call him, don't you know.) People bought it. Penn is betting that they will buy "Hillary," and my guess is that everybody will be calling her that (and nothing else) in colloquial speech by November 2008.

The 9/11 Generation: Better Than The Boomers

In the 1960s, history called the Baby Boomers. They didn't answer the phone.

Confronted with a generation-defining conflict, the cold war, the Boomers--those, at any rate, who came to be emblematic of their generation--took the opposite path from their parents during World War II. Sadly, the excesses of Woodstock became the face of the Boomers' response to their moment of challenge. War protests where agitated youths derided American soldiers as baby-killers added no luster to their image.

Few of the leading lights of that generation joined the military. Most calculated how they could avoid military service, and their attitude rippled through the rest of the century. In the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, military service didn't occur to most young people as an option, let alone a duty.

But now, once again, history is calling. Fortunately, the present generation appears more reminiscent of their grandparents than their parents.

I've spent much of the past two weeks speaking with young people (and a few not-so-young) who have made the decision to serve their country by volunteering for the military. Some of these men have Ivy League degrees; all of them are talented and intelligent individuals who--contrary to John Kerry's infamous "botched joke" ("Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq")--could have chosen to do anything with their lives. Having signed up, they have either gone to Iraq orlook forward to doing so. Not surprisingly, the mainstream media have underreported their stories.

New Tallest Building: Dubai Tower Becomes Building In the World

Previous Top 10

In 1996 this resulted in the completion of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur. From that moment on a sort of media clash was unleashed. All over the world people debated about the question wich one was the tallest; Sears or Petronas. Now the answer to this question seems so easy. Just measure both buildings from bottom to top, and the tallest one gets the title. Question answered, case closed, no more debate needed? Forget it! As usual, life is not that simple. One could consider how to measure these buildings. For example, do we take in account spires and antennas? To end this discussion, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat made a compromise. They defined 4 categories for measuring tall buildings;

- Height to the structural or architectural top.
- Height to the highest occupied floor.
- Height to the top of the roof.
- Height to the top of antenna.

Their War: Less than 1 percent of the U.S. population serves in our military. In a time of war, what should that mean to the rest of us?

Huge Dust Plumes From China Cause Changes in Climate

Courtesy SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center and ORBIMAGE

A satellite view from 2001 shows dust arriving in California from Asian deserts. Concentrations of dust are visible to the south, near the coastline (lower right); To the west the dust is mixed with clouds over open ocean. This dust event caused a persistent haze in places like Death Valley, California, where skies are usually crystal clear.

Does It Matter What Others Think?

Abortion: You Desire and Do Not Have, So You Kill

Three questions with regard to abortion:

1. What is happening?
2. Why is it happening?
3. What should our response be?

Terror Estimate: Safer than we were, but not safe yet.

John Piper's "Romans Audio

John Piper packs 35 of his Romans sermons into about 6 hours in these audio messages that we've recently posted. They're from a four-part lecture series that he did on Romans 9-11 which also included some Q & A.

Towards the beginning of session 3 he unpacks the main argument of his book The Justification of God, giving us approximately "250 pages in five minutes" as he describes it.

Listen here:

• Session 1
• Session 2
• Session 3
• Session 4
• Q & A

Al Qaeda’s Iranian Connection

Bush Would Rather Fight Than Switch: The president stands by the surge.