Op-Ed

Gushy reviews began as soon as George W. Bush stepped away from the podium in the House chamber. On NBC, Tim Russert explained that the performance was especially impressive due to the new president's personal history of being podium-adverse: "I was amazed at how conversational he was tonight, and confident and comfortable." An analyst for ABC News marveled that Bush had established a "commanding presence."

By the next day, the media verdict was in: The nation's leader is learning to make effective use of a TelePrompTer!

Stage presence, cadence, rhythm, choreography -- they can really add up in the professional calculations by journalists. And Bush, known to have a remarkably short attention span, seems to be well-suited to a medium that greatly values style over substance. Like a negative in a developing pan, the current president's TV profile is taking shape. Some political reporters scoff in private, no doubt, but their on-the-job respect is thick as dense smoke.

AUSTIN, Texas -- A character in the "The Red Fox" observed that all government comes down to three questions:

• "Who benefits, who profits?"

• "Who rules the rulers?"
• "What the hell will they do to us next?"

The "Who benefits?" part of President Bush's proposed tax cut has been thoroughly examined. Even the dimmest of us have got the point that it's a tax cut for the very rich with a little sop thrown in for some of the rest of us. According to the Citizens for Tax Justice, the poorest 20 percent of taxpayers receive on average a $15 tax cut the first year and $37 by 2004.

The 20 percent of taxpayers in the middle of the income distribution scale get an average of $170 in tax cuts, rising to $409 in 2004.

The average cut to the top 1 percent of taxpayers would be $13,469 in 2002 and $31,201 in 2004. The Bush plan gives 43 percent of all the tax relief to the richest 1 percent of the people.

Few of us seem to be alert to the other shoe here. The counterpart of "Who benefits?" is "Who pays?"

Henry Kissinger usually has an easy time defending the indefensible on national television. But he faced some pointed questions during a recent interview with the PBS "NewsHour" about the U.S. role in bringing a military dictatorship to Chile. When his comments aired on Feb. 20, the famous American diplomat made a chilling spectacle of himself.

Nearly three years after the U.S.-backed coup that overthrew the elected socialist president Salvador Allende in September 1973 and brought Augusto Pinochet to power, Kissinger huddled with the general in Chile. A declassified memo says that Kissinger told Pinochet: "We are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here."

While interviewing Kissinger, "NewsHour" correspondent Elizabeth Farnsworth asked him point-blank about the discussion with Pinochet. "Why did you not say to him, 'You're violating human rights. You're killing people. Stop it.'?"

The power to depict history is entangled with the power to create it. George Orwell observed long ago: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." And so it is in 2001, as American media outlets draw conclusions about the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

For conservative pundits, the two are open-and-shut cases of virtue and depravity; honor and its absence. The Gipper's recent 90th birthday brought an outpouring of tributes from top Republican image-crafters and media commentators, often one and the same. Reagan is now "lauded and embraced not only by the country but by its opinion leaders, its media, its historians and elites," Peggy Noonan rejoiced.

In Africa, 17 million people have already died of AIDS. In developing countries around the world, twice that many are now HIV positive. Such statistics are largely unfathomable. And news accounts rarely explore basic options for halting the deadly momentum.

But during the past several weeks, some major U.S. media outlets have taken bold and valuable steps in coverage of the global fight against AIDS. Mainstream journalists are making headway in reporting on a crucial issue: How can life-saving drugs get to poor people who need them?

Time magazine published a 20-page cover story in its Feb. 12 edition, combining stark photos with text about AIDS and its victims in Africa. "We have no medicines for AIDS," says a South African doctor. "So many hospitals tell them, 'You've got AIDS. We can't help you. Go home and die.'"

AUSTIN, Texas -- Welcome to George W. Bush's world of fuzzy policy thinking. If you find yourself confused, befuddled or confounded by his recent proposals, don't worry about a thing. You understand them perfectly. They just don't make much sense.

Let me see if I can help with some of your questions:

What, you wonder, does drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge have to do with solving California's energy crisis? Absolutely nothing, so don't waste time trying to find the connection. Less than 1 percent of California's electricity comes from oil.

Will allowing power plants in California to pollute more help solve the energy crisis there? No, Bush is just misinformed on that point, according to environmentalists, California state officials and energy-industry spokesmen.

Is there anything that the president can do about the California crisis? Yes, he might impose a temporary cap on wholesale electricity prices, but he has already announced that he will not, thus foreclosing (if nothing else) a useful threat.

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil -- The question, from a participant here at the World Social Forum, was polite and understated: "Sometimes, one wonders if the poor political consciousness and the lack of information about the world of the standard American is not one of the problems of the world today. Do you think we all could help in some way to get Americans more aware of the rest of the world?"

The question -- directed at me because I'd just given a speech -- hung in the air while my brain fumbled for a fitting response. Programming decisions by U.S. media executives loom large at home and abroad. A hundred years ago, when Queen Victoria died, the sun never set on the British empire. Today, around the world, the market shares are shimmering for AOL Time Warner, the Walt Disney Co. and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Now that Texas and George W. Bush have parted company, things are looking up deep in the heart. In fact, a positively astonishing number of good bills actually have a chance of passing this session, and I think we owe it in part to having the Texas record examined so publicly during the campaign. Some of us seem to have been startled by what we learned.

First, the Lege may actually do something about the infamous grandfathered plants. You'll be pleased to learn the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission has issued a report on how much progress in cleaning up air pollution has been made under George W.'s famous "voluntary compliance" program. The total amount of reduced emissions from grandfathered plants attributable to the governor's program is zero.

All our major cities are in danger of losing billions in federal highway funds if we don't move on the air pollution crisis, so the time is nigh.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Haven't had so much fun reading a book since I was 12 and found "The Three Musketeers."

Thomas Frank's One Market, Under God is a populist romp over the most delicious idiocies of the past decade. The obligatory subtitle is "Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism and the End of Economic Democracy," which doesn't sound promising, but this is a ring-tailed tooter.

The book is a delicious chronicle of the hubris of capitalism in our time, and it contains some of the most savagely funny cultural criticism I have ever come across.

Of course, it's really not fair -- all Frank has to do is quote them: business as God, technology as divinity, the New Economy as the end of history. We live in a culture that produces books like "God Wants You to Be Rich" and "Jesus, CEO."

What's startling about this book is the extent to which we're so surrounded by this nincompoopery but don't even notice it. How many TV ads for stock brokerages do you suppose you've seen in the past 10 years? Anything about them strike you as funny?

LUBBOCK, Texas -- I'm back where most of the world is sky, the people are wonderful, and the water tastes funny. We are on Day Five of the Restoration and, ooops, not looking good.

Of special concern out here is the confirmation of Ann Veneman as secretary of agriculture. Veneman worked for both Ronald Reagan and George Bush the Elder on farm issues; she was director of California's Food and Agriculture Department under Gov. Pete Wilson and was most recently an agribusiness lawyer.

According to John Nichols in The Nation, "Veneman has rarely missed an opportunity to advance the interests of food-production and processing conglomerates, to encourage policies that lead to the displacement of family farms by huge factory farms, to open public lands for mineral extraction and timbering, to support genetic modification of food and to defend biotech experimentation with agriculture."