''What Ifs'' About the Bagram Bomber and A Post-Cheney VP

The suicide bombing that killed more than 20 at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan while Vice President Dick Cheney was visiting ... it makes you wonder:

What would happen if anything happened to Dick Cheney? It's not an unreasonable question, or a cruel one. The man has a famously bad ticker, and now this...

Who might George W. Bush select as a successor to Cheney as vice president? Now ordinarily this might be a hot job, what with a presidential election coming up in less than two years. It might be considered an anointing of a Bush successor in the GOP ranks, a singling out of somebody to take the Republican reins and ride that horse to victory.

But with the Iraq war going on, and on, and on, the potential vice presidents might be more inclined to run the other way. Consider poor Hubert H. Humphrey, who was already Lyndon Johnson's vice president when Johnson chose not to run for another term, leaving it to Humphrey to slog through the 1968 election with his boss' war slung around his neck like a particularly stinky albatross. The Democratic peace-party candidates lacerated him as a war surrogate. Even Richard Nixon, the ``New Nixon,'' looked more like his own man than Humphrey.

So who might Bush turn to in the event of such a loss? McCain? Giuliani? Maybe bring Bill Frist back into the lists? Bob Dole, again? Mitt ''at large'' Romney? Jeb? Come to think of it, the job is so unappealing at present and so unpromising for the future that it might only be blood ties, not political ones, that could persuade anyone to take the job. Right, bro?