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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.

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.

Gore delivers homilies to journalism students in Colombia University, scarcely more than a stone's throw away from where his erstwhile boss is now proposing to establish an office in Harlem, N.Y., on 125th Street. Each has found his appropriate setting: the defeated veep pouring earnest banalities about journalism and politics into the eager ears of ambitious high-fliers already sending their resumes and worthy clips to the New York Times; Clinton, the moral reprobate, fleeing a blizzard of criticism for auctioning a pardon to a billionaire crook by setting up shop among the poorer folk.

Sneering at Bill, the press corps has nothing much to be proud of. How come not a single one of those high-flying, White House-connected newshounds managed to get hold of the sensational fact, finally disclosed a couple of weeks ago, that Bill Clinton and Al Gore hadn't had a significant conversational encounter in a full year? They finally had a melt-down gripe session not long before the recent election. As always, it turns out we know nothing about what really goes on in the White House. George W.

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.'"