There is a savage irony in the way that Bill Clinton is being treated by fellow Americans, and we should have more sense than to wallow in the show. There is much to find fault with in his presidency: selfish, cynical and hypocritical policies shamelessly lifted from the programmes of discredited predecessors.
Russians are told that if they are to retain the goodwill of the United States and the support of the International Monetary Fund they must stick to the policies of Boris Yeltsin, which have all but destroyed them.
Afghanistan and Sudan are bombed to satisfy the appetite for vengeance of many who haven't the faintest idea where they are, let alone how they come to be blamed for the loss of American lives in two other dark and distant places.
But if Bill Clinton is removed from office or forced to resign, it won't be because he has followed the poverty-stricken example of Ronald Reagan or George Bush, not to mention Richard Nixon. It won't even be because he has so far failed to provide, as promised, a decent health system in a fairer society.
Those who might expect to benefit from a fairer society still support him; those who would call it creeping socialism never did.
It will be because low politics and lower journalism have triumphed over decency and reason. Because brazen Republicans and cowardly Democrats, feeding and fed by hypocrisy and prejudice, have chosen to follow the mob by pretending to lead it.
It will be a first for tabloid journalism, which has manufactured, managed and marketed an issue on which few if any of its own practitioners could afford to be tested.
Tabloid journalism, it's well to remember, is a form which often has more to do with cast of mind than shape of page. And it's not, by any means, confined to print.
It thrives on prurience and confusion; ignores the difference between public curiosity and the public interest; can't tell life and death from gossip and entertainment.
It claims to respond to public demand. Why not? It has probably just invented it. And if you believe that money was the last thing in the inventor's mind, you may well be right.
When I first spent some time in the United States, Nixon was President, and Bush - then ambassador at the United Nations - bored the visiting reporters of more than 20 countries to lunch.
What intrigued us Europeans, however, was America's flourishing political satire and a song which featured an odd quartet - Haldeman, Erlich man, Mitchell and Dean.
Scandal was in the air and it seemed the President's men were up to their necks in it. This was true, though those who said so could not have guessed how they were to be proved right.
Watergate was one of the century's great political scandals. Exposed with persistence and courage by Woodward, Bernstein and the Washington Post. Proved by assiduous investigators to the satisfaction of a scrupulous judge, John J. Sirica.
It came to be accepted, not only as a verdict on Nixon's presidency and his abuse of power, but as evidence of deep and dangerous flaws in American politics - a byword for dirty tricks, croneyism and cover-up.
What the present case has in common with Watergate is that one was, and the other is, the stuff of satire. But what we are watching now is tragedy grotesquely played as farce.
This is not about the use or abuse of power by the President. It's about the ambitions of those who want to be rid of him. People who have the power and influence to make it uncomfortable, if not impossible, for him to stay.
Newspapers which carry reports of visitors from outer space complain about his lies. Politicians who find no fault with the bombing of Sudan and Afghanistan drone on about his morals.
There are crazy echoes here of Ireland in the 1950s when attention was diverted from so much that was seriously wrong by endless harping on minor issues, raised to induce crippling guilt.
It's crazy because so many in the rest of the world had come to believe the United States was beyond (if not above) all this and would never again inherit the wind.
Now it seems bent on proving that, to adapt one of Claud Cockburn's favourite phrases, its leaders have grown too small for their boots and are incapable of distinguishing between matters of world importance and personal affairs.
The madness is catching. BBC 1's evening news covers Clinton first, then moves to Russia, with a startling comparison: "President Yeltsin is in big trouble too."
He is. Russia is on the verge of collapse. Mikhail Gorbachev says Mr Yeltsin is intellectually, physically and politically dead.
(Listeners may have thought for a moment that it was something serious. Like Mr Clinton's trouble.)
No wonder that publication of the Starr report will be followed by what RTE's Washington correspondent, Mark Little, describes as "a spasm of intense reflection" in the White House.
While they're at it, Mr Clinton's helpers should check the praise being given him by his supporters. Morning Ireland says it's fulsome. Or, as the dictionary has it, "cloying, nauseous, offensive, rank or disgustingly fawning".
Mr Clinton has a mixed record in world affairs. We have reason to praise him, though not fulsomely, for his role in Ireland's affairs, before, during and since the negotiation of the Belfast Agreement.
Some say his engagement was a result of his need to chalk up a success in foreign policy. It makes little difference why he intervened. What he did was even-handed and helpful.
The Russians have no such reason to praise him or his country. Led by the US, the world's wealthiest states might have prevented disaster in the Soviet Union.
Instead, they chose to abandon Gorbachev and his 150 million fellow citizens, for what looked (and still looks) like crass ideological reasons. And in the weeks in which Russia has plumbed the depths of its deepest crisis since the second World War, the media of the West have been obsessed by an affair which ought to have been none of their business.
If this kind of nonsense had been customary in Daniel O'Connell's time, by all accounts he'd have spent more time defending his own reputation than either his clients or the interest of the Irish people.
If Alexander the Great had been given the Clinton treatment he'd have spent his time answering questions from the crowd at home in Macedonia instead of conquering the world.
And the next president of the United States will arrive in the White House wrapped in cotton wool and labelled "Untouched by human hand".