The White House's Top Dogs

My completely updated Who's Who in the White House is just out, sort of a companion piece to last week's updated West Wing floor plan.

President Bush has by my count six "top" White House advisers -- in alphabetical order, counselor Dan Bartlett, Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney, policy adviser Michael Gerson, national security adviser Steve Hadley, and political adviser Karl Rove.

But alphabetical order puts Cheney in the middle and Rove at the end, and that just ain't right. So I've created a new uber-category-- "The top two" -- to do honor to the enormous and possibly unprecedented role those gentlemen have in helping Bush make up his mind about things.

My Who's Who includes not only short profiles but, in keeping with the nature of this column, painstakingly winnowed links to highly recommended key stories available on the Web.

And in addition to Bush's six chief advisers, I round out the Who's Who with eight other top aides.

Cheney Gets His Way, Part I

More than three weeks ago, Cheney appeared on the Larry King show on CNN, and made a dramatic assertion about the situation in Iraq: "I think the level of activity that we see today, from a military standpoint, I think will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."

Cheney's comment has been widely cited as the most extreme example of White House optimism about Iraq that appears to be unsupported -- in fact, starkly contradicted -- by reports from the ground.

And until yesterday, the White House had -- at times, spectacularly -- dodged the issue of whether or not Cheney's comment reflected an official White House position.

I called attention in Friday's column (scroll down to "A Classic Exchange") to a remarkable back-and-forth between ABC News's Terry Moran and McClellan, in which McClellan repeatedly shook off the question of whether the insurgency is, in the White House's opinion, in its last throes.

At yesterday's briefing, after another slugfest, McClellan finally gave a direct answer: "Yes."

Here's how it came about:

"Q Scott, can we get a clear 'yes' or 'no' answer on whether the President agrees on the Vice President's assessment that the insurgency is in 'its last throes?' Is it a 'yes' or 'no'?