If one moment in this remarkable US media week perfectly measured the coarsening of the public discourse which the Clinton presidency has coincided with, it was the delicate phrasing and eager faces of the news anchors who announced that Monica Lewinsky had retained a cocktail dress which was, ahem, stained with the issue of the presidential loin. Ms Lewinsky had told her friend Linda Tripp that she was never going to wash the dress.
Good news then for the curator of the Clinton Presidential Museum, but another benchmark moment in a week which saw the airwaves crackles with the weird and the wonderful.
"Back after these messages with a biblical expert on whether oral sex constitutes adultery, and a counsellor explains how to answer those awkward questions from your kids."
Monica. Monica. Monica. Between the counsellors and the experts and the ideological cranks it has been, as the New York Times balefully noted, "all Monica, all the time".
It was OJ and it was Diana and it was the Oklahoma bombing. Twenty-four hour coverage with special "Scandal in the Whitehouse" logos to sit over the anchor's shoulder. It was a big production but for most of the week there was no chorusline.
In a week when the Clintons' allies and foes alike were keeping their heads down (no other phrase comes to mind) it was left to entrepreneurial media commentators operating in truncated news cycles to keep the hoi polloi tuned in and turned on.
It came easily, one station merely reporting as fact what another was reporting as rumour until the muddy waves of scandal seemed to lap over them all in a murky spin cycle.
"It is being reported on CNN that the president engaged in phone sex, which if true would be immensely disturbing. Bob?"
"On ABC it is being reported that the presidential encounters were limited to oral sex but apparently, and we are just learning this, it took place 20 times." Audible gasp.
"And breaking news - we are hearing from an affiliate that the secret service may have interrupted the president and Ms Lewinsky on one of their encounters. There is apparently, and I must stress this is breaking news at this stage, a possibility of video footage. We'll bring you news after these messages."
At the serious end of the print media spectrum there has briefly been a facsimile of the sort of expression rabbits produce when caught in the headlights of a runaway truck. TV has made the running, reporting every rumour and whisper with breathless gravity, turning the story over by the hour with an enthusiastic salaciousness which left the broadsheets paralysed as they agonised over the probity of mentioning oral sex and semen in the front page lead. Having duly noted their own scruples most papers dived right in.
Yet it has been a uniquely televisual spectacle, fronted by a group of characters who look like refugees from the afternoon talk show circuit. Linda "betrayed her best friend and isn't sorry". Monica "hates dry cleaning". Hillary "turns a blind eye to her husband's adventures" and Lucianne, "former spy who just loves to dish".
Even poor old Walt Whitman has had his reputation carelessly traduced, his intensely naturalistic introspection and agonising reduced to the status of filler prose between the pictures in Penthouse.
"Sensuous poetry, the experts say, Bob." "Yes Karen, sexy poetry. The president gave a book of sexual poetry to a young intern, young enough to be . . . "
With all the giddy talk of impeachment and resignation, TV wanted to show precedent but could make no linear connection with Nixon's downfall, which unfolded over the space of 26 months in a time of slower news cycles and more rigorous fact checking.
Mischievously, the guys and girls revelled regardless in the smoggy echoes vaulting through the firestorm.
There were late night chuckles about Clinton's own Deep Throat and CREEP (You remember Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President . . . ) and the existence of tapes and creep (Tripp and Monica's favourite word to describe the president) and the little swarming world of internecine betrayals and creep (dang, don't ya'll geddit, ain't it spooky?). Plus, there was the ominous mention of the Watergate apartment building where Lewinsky was shacked up. Not just shacked up but shacked next door to Bob Dole we were told (gravely, as if Dole was in dire danger. Let's just hope and pray that Bob doesn't to get sucked into this darn thing).
There were signs of discreet but ruthless counter-intelligence at work as the hapless Lewinsky had her life turned inside out. Documents pertaining to her parents' divorce revealed that Mr Lewinsky had been shelling out $750 a month for therapy for his kids. Not enough? Too much? Who knew?
TV cameras turned up on neighbours' porches and in the faces of friends. With Linda Tripp having wrapped up the voting for "friend of the year" it was no time to be coy.
Monica? Oh she was fat and she was slutty and she was mouthy and she was a liar but in Beverly Hills High School they had voted her Girl Whose Name Was Most Likely To End Up In Lights.
Short of hearing that they had voted her Head Girl the tabloid TV shows couldn't have been more tickled.
The business of damping down the latest bimbo eruption, indeed the Mount Etna of bimbo eruptions, was slow to get into full swing, but just before Tuesday's State of the Union address a ponytailed drama teacher and his wife stood behind their plump roseatte lawyer somewhere in Portland, Oregon as the lawyer announced, apropos nothing in particular, that the teacher had enjoyed a five-year affair with Lewinsky.
"This could end up being the million man march" cackled the late night talk show suits.
Anyway, Mr Bleiler, drama teacher of Portland, Oregon concluded his 15 minutes of fame by denouncing Monica Lewinsky as a liar and a fantasist. The impact on enrolment in Mr Bleiler's drama classes is not yet known.
The whole production is playing to a bemused audience, however. The polls and vox pops which are dotted through the wall-to-wall wraparound non-stop Monica Monica Monica coverage suggest that the American public isn't quite as ready for the criminalisation of consensual sexual activity as their its is.
People understand the gravity of lying, thank you very much, but aren't too sure why their president was forced into a corner in the first place. There is a reflex denial in such cases, the "it's not what it seems" defence, which is understandable and human and definitely not the sort of thing ordinarily associated with epochal events like presidential impeachments.
There is a tension in all this. Frothing anchor people and salivating beat reporters have been taken aback, nay offended, by the impertinence of many Joe and Jolene Publics who have vox popped to the effect that "the president should be allowed just get on with his job".
Americans have lived for some time now with the knowledge that gravity exerts an unusually insistent pull on their president's zipper, indeed they knew long before they elected him (twice) that the first citizen would be schlepping an unusually large libido with him wherever he went.
In a time of plenty they have been able to live with that, just as they have accommodated new knowledge or old rumours about George Bush, FDR, JFK and others. Clinton's popularity with women persistently belies the more sordid implications of the existence of such Whitehouse special teams as the Bimbo Patrol and the Bimbo Eruption Team. TV regretfully pulls the curtains back on a nation not exactly horrified by GobbleGate but just made slightly nauseous by the entire circus.
The insistent connecting of private behaviour to public performance isn't wholly pleasing to an electorate which conceivably checks its own closet for skeletons a little more rigorously than the media do. Clinton's popularity has shifted downwards but not in earthshattering percentages and not greatly so with minority groups.
"Doesn't character matter to America anymore?" has been the forehead-furrowing question posed by TV talking heads after each foray into the real world. "Doesn't character matter?"
The character of the media matters more than the media suspect. There are even small signs of a backlash against the press and the prosecutors, a movement which may be strangled at birth by the media.
It has been suggested that the weight of the crimes committed by Clinton (and Mike Espy, Henry Cisneros and possibly Bruce Babbit) are not commensurate with the obscene weight of the prosecutorial forces brought to bear.
Behind the airwaves this week's ugly frenzy of self-righteousness has best been symbolised by the overwhelmingly prissy figure of special counsel Kenneth Starr as he patrols an ever-expanding arena of operations which have led him from investigating the details of an obscure 20-year-old Arkansas land deal to eavesdropping on girl-talk about fellatio and fashion.
Starr has spent $30 million and four years on his investigation so far and appears to be excavating with heavy machinery rather than digging carefully at this stage, hoping to unearth enough dirt to sift his way back and put together a crime.
In late night fleeting moments of perspective it is whispered that the tapes at the centre of this episode were illegally gained, are probably inadmissible and would seem to have little or nothing to do with Whitewater or with what happened in a hotel room with Paula Jones. Mr Starr will have to account for himself sometime soon when the storm settles.
AS regards Clinton, the central assertion seems so believable, but in the context of Washington so squalidly small and venial, that it once again suggests the scenario of the Clintons slugging it out against the Washington establishment which has always despised them. In a world of sedans and town cars the Clintons have always had a white stretch limo without tinted windows.
By the time perspective grips the media, however, it could be too late for the Clintons.
Clinton could resign quickly into a twilight of uncomfortable martyrdom leaving Kenneth Starr to explain it all. There is nothing in Clinton's past to suggest he will do that. In times of trouble (and in times with interns) he operates like a rat in heat.
On Tuesday night in one of the more colourful passages of an applause-milking State of the Union address, Clinton waxed patriotically about "a tattered flag glimpsed through the smoke of battle".
He might have been thinking of himself and his own seemingly unending saga of loss and recovery played out on the battlefield of the airwaves.
Clinton looked saggy-eyed and weary as the story first broke but the political animal in him recognised the national reluctance to throw the baby out with the bathwater until they have had time to hear the baby's side of the story. As the baby clung white-knuckled to the rim of the bath his electorate bid the chorus of primetime Cassandras to hush with their catchline of "he's only got himself to blame, he's only got himself to blame".
It is entirely possible that Bill Clinton will spin out of this one, not with a clean pair of heels but damaged until some national catastrophe (or Saddam Hussein) comes along which might rehabilitate him by way of distraction.
The confluence of so many venial sins will cripple him till the end, one suspects. If he escapes Lewinsky he still has the extravaganza that will be the Paula Jones case and the allegation, gleefully reported in the newly liberated media, that the presidential penis leans to one side. USA Today has hitherto stopped short of graphs but the subject does lend itself.
Of course, there is more to the Jones and Lewinsky cases than mere sex. Allegedly there is harassment and witness tampering and abuse of position, but it is the sex which has fuelled the media spectacle and it is spectacle itself which has diminished the trust and standing necessary for Clinton to govern.
Clinton is unlikely to either resign or be fully vindicated. He is playing for his shot at history. Three years of big ideas and grand themes might just eclipse the memory of the Oral Office era.
And his enemies? When the media and special counsels, self-appointed and otherwise, get done and realise that "honey we shrunk the president", a return to old values and constraints in journalism might be the most appropriate first step in restoring the lustre to American public life.
But first these messages . . .