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The air now quivers with gloomy assessments of the secrets "compromised" by the FBI's Robert Hanssen, a senior official who stands accused of working for the Russians since 1985.

If you believe the FBI affidavit against him filed in federal court, Hanssen betrayed spies working for the United States, some of whom were then executed. Among many other feats, he allegedly ratted on "an entire technical program of enormous value, expense and importance to the United States," which turns out to have been the construction of a tunnel under the new Soviet Embassy in Washington D.C. He trundled documents by the cartload to "dead drops" in various suburbs around Washington D.C., often within a few minutes walk from his house.

A skeleton is rattling in George Will's closet. But it's difficult to hear above the steady applause from his elite boosters inside the media business.

Widely viewed as one of the nation's most influential journalists, Will churns out syndicated columns that appear in hundreds of daily papers. He also writes for Newsweek. And he's a regular on ABC's "This Week." He is definitely outspoken -- but don't expect him to speak out about the fact that Juanita Yvette Lozano now faces up to 15 years in prison.

"A woman who worked for a media company that produced ads for President George W. Bush's campaign was indicted for secretly mailing a videotape of Bush practicing for a debate to Vice President Al Gore's campaign," an Associated Press story explained the other day. Accompanying the 60-minute video were about 120 pages of the Bush team's confidential material for debate preparation.

Apparently the deserts of Nevada, so similar in terrain to the Pentagon's other main target practice area, the Iraqi outback, simply aren't challenging enough for the Navy's top guns anymore. Now they want to bomb around Big Sur, natural jewel of California's Central Coast, home of the Henry Miller library, the Esalen Institute, FDR's famous tin house, Nepenthe and much more.

A new plan issued by the Navy's Strike Fighter Wing in January calls for nearly 3,000 bombing practice runs a year from Lemoore Naval Air Station in the Central Valley and aircraft carriers in the Pacific to Fort Hunter Liggett in the Santa Lucia Mountains, whose oceanward slope is Big Sur. Lemoore is the home base for the F/A-18 Hornet strike fighter planes. The scheme calls for the jets to drop 25-pound "test" bombs onto a 500- foot in diameter target painted on the grounds of Fort Hunter Liggett. One Navy flack terms the plan "kindergarten for bombers."

Hearken to the delighted squawks of the Republicans about the Rich pardon and about the vindication of their charge that Clinton is morally beyond the pale, the worst of the worst. Who do they think they're kidding? Corruption of the presidential power to pardon? Let's just take another look at those pardons issued by George Bush Sr. at the onset and conclusion of his presidential term.

In 1989, President Bush used his power to pardon a longtime Soviet spy who had been prudent enough to offer $1.3 million to Ronald Reagan's presidential library, plus a $110,000 disbursement to the Republican National Committee (RNC), this latter bribe being made in the week of Bush's inauguration. The pardon duly came a few months later, on Aug. 14, 1989.

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.

The vultures are picking his bones. Bob Herbert, Salon, Barney Frank, Joe Biden, Lannie Davis ... they've all finally thrown Bill over the side. In the Wall Street Journal Hamilton Jordan stigmatized Bill and Hillary as "the First Grifters," the term used for scam artists preying on the poor and desperate in the Depression of the 1930s. "The Clintons," Jordan sneered, "are not a couple, but a business partnership, not based on love or even greed, but on shared ambitions. Everywhere they go, they leave a trail of disappointed, disillusioned friends and staff members to clean up after them." Jordan contrasted the elevated moral tone of the Carter White House against the Augean filth of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Clinton time.

If he, Jordan, had recommended something like the Rich pardon, "Carter would have thrown me out of the Oval Office and probably fired me on the spot." As for Clinton's hubris after Lewinsky-gate, "If a president can get caught having sex in the Oval Office with an intern and commit perjury about it to a federal grand jury, and still get away with it, what could possibly stop him?"

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?"

Bombing the Iraqis should properly be listed as part of the Inaugural ceremonies -- a man not being truly president of the United States till he drops high explosives on Baghdad or environs. The new team evidently felt that the new Commander-in-Chief could not be allowed to leave the jurisdiction, even to Mexico, without unleashing planes and bombs against Saddam, for whom the bombardment produced the effect of widespread sympathy across the world for Iraq.

Bill Clinton delayed this portion of his inaugural ceremonies to June 27, 1993, when he was urged by Vice President Al Gore to order a salvo of cruise missiles, supposedly in retaliation for an alleged Iraqi plot to kill George Bush Sr., when he visited Kuwait in April of 1993. Eight of the 23 missiles homed in with deadly imprecision on a residential suburb in Baghdad, one of them killing Iraq's leading artist, Leila al-Attar.

Clinton's pollster Stan Greenberg, who did daily surveys on the popular sentiment, reported to the Commander-in-Chief that bombardment of Iraq caused an uptick of 11 points. Bomb your way into favorable headlines has been the policy of every president since the Second World War.

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 general turns out to be a coward. When Chilean police knocked on Augusto Pinochet's door and threatened to slap the cuffs on him, Pinochet fainted.

Pinochet was placed under house arrest on Jan. 28 for his role in ordering the massacre known as the Caravan of Death, one of his innumerable crimes in his 17 years as dictator of Chile. Pinochet had already deployed the "doddering don" routine, feigning the Alzheimer's disease that afflicts his pal Ronald Reagan. It got him out of England last fall. And it may yet save him from culpability for the killing of more than 3,000 people during his years of terror.

Pinochet's increasing desperation probably stemmed from the fact that right there in Chile, his minions, loyal these many years, are beginning to turn on him to save their own skins.