• The report had to go into sordid detail. There was no other way to counter what might be called the Embarrassment Strategy. It's worked in the past. For whenever Bill Clinton wanted to deny an affair, a dalliance, a sexual episode, he would do so in general terms for political purposes, trusting that ladies and gentlemen would inquire no further. It would be too embarrassing. But it turns out that Kenneth Starr and his legal team are not paid to be ladies and gentlemen but to investigate. They did.

• The president's testimony quoted in this report -- first in the Paula Jones case and then, God save him and stop him, before the grand jury investigating him -- may represent the latest apotheosis of the clinton clause. It's no longer a little escape hatch in every sentence. It has become an entire language of its own. It is a language in which answering questions "accurately and fully'' means not answering them accurately and fully; sexual relations are not sexual relations; and a woman can have sexual relations with this president while he is not having sexual relations with her. It's a whole, Clintonian newspeak in which good's bad today and black's white today and day's night today and anything goes. Lewis Carroll would understand, or at least his Humpty Dumpty would:

"The question is,'' said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things.''

"The question is,'' said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master --- that's all.''

And hasn't Bill Clinton always been a master of words? He can use the same phrase to mean one thing legally and another politically till it comes to mean nothing at all.

Now an even greater spectacle than the birth of an indecipherable language awaits. The American people are about to see sober and respectable citizens, some of them not even lawyers, defend or at least condone the practice of perjury, at least if it in any way involves a sexual relationship. (Or, in Clintonspeak, a nonsexual relationship.)

Call it the Clinton Defense, or maybe the Clinton Exclusion, which is what it will be called if the president beats this rap. For what happens to Bill Clinton will affect more than Bill Clinton. Anyone accused of perjury or suborning it, obstructing justice or witness tampering, will surely want to consider the Clinton Defense. And courts and juries will have to.

To judge from the polls -- which is, I grant you, a low and contemptible habit -- this is just what enlightened liberalism may be reduced to in the next few weeks. For a great number of Americans appear convinced that the president lied under oath but don't think it's a crime, or much of a crime, or a high crime and misdemeanor, or just don't care very much.

At this point it occurs that what happens to Bill Clinton isn't all that important compared to what's happening to the rest of us. A precedent is being set in law and well beyond the law. For the American people are on trial here, too. And we will see just how seriously we still take the law, and truth, and justice. And honor. We will see whether those old words have much meaning anymore, or have they, too, been reduced to clinton clauses? For in these polls is mirrored the whole, clintonized culture.