HOW troubled are Americans about Slick Willie’s behaviour, about the fact that he is the most crooked President in all US history? If polls are to believed, general reaction is exactly what could be expected from people who have surrendered the pulpit for the TV screen, who take their moral code and cultural standards from such noble works as Baywatch, The Simpsons, Dallas and Beavis & Butthead.

During Clinton’s disclosures,  Sept 9, 1998, a CNN/USA Today poll showed his public approval rating at nearly 70%. As this is written, it is 55%: which suggests that America’s greatest problem is not in the Oval office, but with the profound moral breakdown now evidenced in the American people themselves. For anyone at all concerned about the state of Western civilisation, it is heartbreaking.

Here you have an ageing Lothario, uncouth, coarse and vulgar, exposed as a tomcat predator, a man who used his high office to seduce young and impressionable girls in his employ, while seemingly habitually propositioning women he had never seen before to give him oral sex. By any standards, surely the actions of a moral idiot, reflecting the maturity of a ten-year old with the judgement of a two-year old?

In every conceivable way Clinton seems to have lost his entire moral orientation. He has diminished the stature and authority of the presidency. He has abused every possible standard of decorum and good taste. He has accumulated more scandal than any other US President before him. Is there any indignity left, any new depth of degradation to which this President’s name cannot be publicly subjected?

Yet. If the polls are anywhere near right, a majority of US citizens are unduly reluctant to tell this moral derelict to blast off, begone, that they no longer want him dishonouring and debasing the White House; that he is a low-life bum, a pathological liar, an incurable coward, a rogue, a sleazeball, a slob, a bounder, a moral basket case, a traitor and a cad.

On the evidence, he is each and all of those things. Yet Time magazine comments: "The people still stand firmly behind their President in his hour of need." Who are these "people"? Presumably, not all of them are New Age quacks, hardline feminists, abortion industry workers, anti-tobacco and anti-gun fascists, ideologically homeless ex-communists, current communists, members of the Black Caucus, food stamp junkies, anti-religious bigots, anti-Christian clerics, lesbian bogos, sodomists, pro-gay clergymen and other assorted nuts and oddballs who seem to make up so much of the US Democratic Party support.

Though it seems that this is not yet fully understood, what Clinton is doing to undermine the moral, ethical and cultural values of the US (and the world generally) is epic in proportion. Toynbee warned us that civilisation has been an intermittent phenomenon, that "the study of civilisation tells us that when moral decay sets in, the society cannot long endure."

Rome died when the early high morality and stern ethical standards collapsed into decay and degradation. The same fate has destroyed 21 other once mighty and illustrious civilisations. America, of course, has been losing the culture war since the late 1950s. Those years saw a confluence of events which were to change and coarsen Western moral standards for ever. Let’s examine the origins of the present crisis, both in Britain and the US.

In Britain it is pretty safe to date the start of the "permissive society" back to the lifting of the censorship ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a book of no great distinction but which, unbanned by the courts, opened up the sluice gates for the pornographic flood. In the US, you had publication of the notorious Kinsey Report, funded by (wouldn’t you know it?) the Rockefeller Foundation. Though today exposed as a scientific con job and massive hoax, Alfred Kinsey’s work was eagerly seized on by those seeking to overthrow traditional moral mores.