Hear Dick Talk, Occasionally: Why Cheney is the Bush administration's best propagandist.

• Author: MacDonald, Sam
• Position: Columns

ONE UNUSUAL ASPECT of the war on terrorism is that its most effective propaganda--on both sides--has come from elusive leaders holed up in secret locations. They surface just long enough to let everyone know they are still alive, still fuming, and still dedicated to the cause.

Osama bin Laden, for example, is said to be hiding in a cave in Afghanistan. In his few public statements, taped and faxed, he has charted out his goals and tried to rally his followers. To be sure, you have to be one of those fanatics to judge bin Laden's effectiveness, but his presentations are certainly easier to take than the screaming rants of his substitute spokesmen. Bin Laden may or may not be media savvy, but I like to think that his is the best impersonation of Dick Cheney this side of Saturday Night Live.

Cheney is, of course, the other warrior who famously sleeps at undisclosed locations. One of wartime Washington's favorite pastimes is trading rumors about the elusive vice president. Where is he? What is he really doing? Have his four heart attacks, cardiac implant, and stress over the war finally caught up with him?

But just as he's written off as dead, Cheney suddenly surfaces and says more in a handful of public appearances than the rest of the administration has said in weeks of babble. If it's answers you want, Cheney's your man. Sure, those answers are often painfully vague, but at least they're short. He makes you wish that some of the administration's other information-mongers would find hideouts of their own. At a minimum, there would be less confusion.

Take the question of Saddam Hussein. President Bush told the world that countries were either "with us or with the terrorists." But what did that mean for countries, such as Iraq, that were already not with us? A grumpy Washington coalition quickly coalesced around The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol, who can't believe that the mother of all humiliated regimes isn't in the crosshairs yet. The frustrated Kristol summed up that school of thought in an October 30 Washington Post op-ed: "No ground troops in Afghanistan; No confrontation with Iraq; No alarm at home. The result? No evident progress so far."

There were early reports that one of the hijackers met with a high-ranking Iraqi official prior to September 11. The plot thickened with the anthrax debacle. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson explained that a Florida tabloid employee got the disease from a contaminated stream. Later...