Billwatch became the prime-time soap of early 1998, eclipsing even the Pope’s visit to Cuba. Why should we care this time? Anyone with a mental age of 12 already knows that the President is an uncontrollable sexual predator. If a single straw could break the camel’s back of our patience, why not the bale after bale of scandal that has been loaded down upon us since Jed struck oil and moved to the hills of Beverlee—or is that another series?

The pundits—Sam and Cokie, Kevin Phillips and Bill Kristol—are all shaking their heads, saying: “This time it is different. This bimbo eruption involves a potential felony.” Who actually cares about obstruction of justice? This is, after all, a nation that believes Vince Foster committed suicide and Ron Brown died in a plane accident, and when the newspapers tell us that X rays reveal that the hole in Mr. Brown’s head was not made by a bullet, we are not at all troubled by the mysterious disappearance of the X rays. If Dan and Tom and Peter tell us everything is all right, then everything is all right.

Then what is all the excitement over Monica Lewinsky? The leaders of both parties—and their spokesmen in the national press—would like us to believe that no one is offended by the President’s indiscretions, either in Arkansas or in the White House. After all, these are private problems for Bill and Hillary to work out between themselves. As the President was being deposed in the Paula Jones case, so-called historians were comparing his lecheries with allegations against George Washington (guilty of writing an affectionate farewell to a lady, using terms of endearment similar to those he employed in a letter to her brother) and Dwight Eisenhower (probably guilty of a romantic wartime liaison). There is no evidence against Washington, while Eisenhower, at the worst, did what many lonely soldiers have done when they are separated from their wives. The only parallels for Clinton are sexual sociopaths like Casanova and Caligula.

There is a reason we do not want people like Casanova in power, and that is because they always turn into Caligula. A man who cannot keep his trousers zipped will not keep his hands out of the nation’s till, and if he cannot go through a day (as Jack Kennedy boasted) without having sex with a strange woman, there is probably no law he will not break, no taboo he will not violate. The most vicious and incompetent tyrants are very often sexual predators—that much we know from reading Aristotle or studying the lives of Roman emperors and European kings like Henry VIII. But the reverse is also true: a sexual predator, once he has power, will use it to gratify all his appetites.

We cannot demand perfection from our leaders, and each nation sets its own standards. When at the funeral of President Mitterrand, both the widow and the mistress made an appearance, the French were charmed. But will we smile at Bill Clinton’s funeral, when an endless parade of bimbos, sluts, and harlots come to pay tribute to “the big creep”?