The resident Man In Washington (Well, On Chesapeke Bay This Time of Year) minces few words in this storming indictment.

	This shows how far America has sunk, and how vulnerable Bill Clinton has rendered his country.	When a country strikes against terrorists, there should be no doubt as to the motives for its actions. When the president of the United States addresses the nation to explain a military campaign in retaliation for the murder of American civilians, there should be no smidgen of a doubt as to the integrity of his words or the authenticity of his actions. Commentators last week spoke about America's actions in Sudan and Afghanistan with a wry smile on their faces. They drew parallels with Wag the Dog, the film in which a war is invented by spinmeisters to counter a presidential sex scandal. That any such parallel could credibly be made shows how far America has sunk in the leadership of the free world, and how vulnerable Bill Clinton has rendered his country and its citizens. The threat of terrorism shows, perhaps more palpably than anything else in a dangerous world, why the president of the United States needs to be able to be believed, trusted and feared. Bill Clinton, after his pathetic, humiliating and duplicitous address last Monday, showed for the last and most definitive time that he is none of these things. Which is why he should do the honourable thing and go now, before the Congress, if justice has any chance, forces him. Whatever grudging admiration one has for an administration that has, in fact, conducted America's domestic affairs with a surpassing competence, there comes a point in any politician's relationship with his peers and his countrymen when something fundamental has broken down. If the most accomplished British prime minister in history were shown to have lied directly and knowingly to the House of Commons, he would still have no choice but to resign. But in many respects Clinton has done far worse than this. He has lied baldly to his own party, to his own staff, to members of Congress, to the representatives of the legal system and, in the most direct and unmistakable terms, to the American people. He has lied under oath and he has lied when he has had no need to whatsoever. He even lied when he semi-apologised last Monday, in saying his testimony in the Jones suit was legally accurate.
	After his pathetic, humiliating and duplicitous address last Monday, Clinton showed he is none of these things.	Doesn't every politician lie? To an extent, of course. But this man has taken the principle of cynical duplicity to a new and chilling level. I saw it upfront when I heard him describe the events in Bosnia as another Holocaust and then take a poll to decide whether to stop it. I saw it when he said he would do anything to end the scourge of Aids and then signed a bill that would have thrown every HIV-positive soldier out of the military. Then there were the meta-scams: the welfare reformer who was eventually forced into it by a Republican Congress and then claimed credit himself (of course); the budget-balancer who was forced into fiscal neutrality by the polls and then claimed it was his proudest legacy; the feminist who routinely treats women as if they are fools, tokens or sexual objects. Is it any excuse to say that the final lie that undid him was about something as trivial as consensual extramarital sex? Surely not. To begin with, it is not a trivial act to take regular sexual advantage of a young employee in the workplace. It is an act of almost pathological recklessness. And if the man cannot confess to such a stupid, sordid dalliance, what hope is there that he'll tell the truth about campaign finance? Or his motives for bombing Afghanistan? If he cannot bring himself to apologise fully, even when he has dragged the entire country and dozens of innocent people into a legal and political morass for seven months, and even when the entire political class is virtually begging to let him off the hook in return for unmitigated contrition, then the truth is he has lost all contact with the meaning of moral responsibility, if not reality itself. And then he had the gall to plead for a new zone of privacy for himself and his family and to enjoin us to repair the fabric of the nation. The narcissism of the man beggars belief.
	He said he would do anything to end the scourge of Aids. Then signed a bill to throw every HIV-positive soldier out of the military.	But perhaps the deepest level of cynicism came in what the administration leaked about Hillary Clinton, who, we were told, had found out about the affair just three days before. The only conceivable response to this was to laugh until you burst a blood vessel. This was the woman who knowingly sat by her husband while he lied about Gennifer Flowers in the 1992 campaign. This was the woman who took the lead in attacking Kenneth Starr days after the Lewinsky scandal broke in January, describing him as part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. And this was the woman who spent most of last weekend prepping her husband for what might well be perjurious testimony and then co-wrote the defiant speech he delivered on Monday night. At what point does one begin to balk at this kind of cynicism and to regard it not simply as contemptible in itself but as a corrosive force in the culture as a whole? Yes, we knew much of this before. We knew he could hardly tell the truth about his golf scores when we re-elected him. But that re-election was based on a spurious gamble: that economic results matter more than political character. What Americans did not count on in 1996 was what making such a moral compromise would do to the character of the man in question. America's moral insouciance allowed Clinton to believe he could get away with almost anything. Which is why he shamelessly corralled shifty businessmen through the White House in return for illegal campaign dollars, chatted on the phone with Dick Morris while Morris played footsie with a prostitute, and cavalierly carried on an affair in his very office with an employee half his age. These are the actions of a man who has come to believe he is beyond the moral measure of anyone else and that nobody has the capacity to catch him.
	If he cannot bring himself to apologise fully, he has lost all contact with the meaning of moral responsibility, if not reality itself.	So now that he is caught, it is little surprise that his response is not contrition but outrage. How dare we hold him accountable now, when we have let him off so many times before? My own bet is that we still don't know the half of it. If Clinton's past is any guide, what the Starr report contains about intimidation of witnesses and encouragement of deceit might make our hair stand on end. Yes, it's petty business. Sex is often a petty business. But honesty in a president is not a petty principle. Without it no system of democratic government can withstand the cynicism and disengagement that will overwhelm it. Clinton has already done a fathomless amount to define down America's collective notions of candour, decency and accountability. If he is shown beyond a doubt to have lied and then is allowed to get away with it, Americans will have gained two years of phoney stability but have lost their constitutional and cultural soul. They will have allowed the chief enforcer of the laws to treat those laws with contempt. They will have tolerated a role model for their children whose definition of morality is whatever he can get away with. Clinton is a cancer on the culture, a cancer of cynicism, narcissism and deceit. At some point, not even the most stellar of economic records, not even the most prosperous of decades, is worth the price of such a cancer metastasising even further. It is time to be rid of it. For good and all. Sooner rather than later.