POT-SMOKING, draft-dodging, libidinous Bill Clinton was always a high-risk choice for the US Presidency. Now, as he faces possible impeachment on "high crimes and misdemeanours," the question no longer is: "Can the Clintons survive?" Much more compelling, the question is: "Can America - and the West - survive the Clintons?"

On all sides, the global economy gives every sign of having entered a death spiral. From Asia to Latin America to Europe, every major nation is falling into recession and depression. In less than a year some US$10 trillion has been wiped from international stock exchanges. In this crisis, all eyes are on the US, the dominant power on earth, to see if it will take up the challenge.

Unfortunately, that does not appear very likely. America, the global bully state which has so pitilessly destroyed so many other nations (not least our own), crushing the lives and hopes of untold millions, today faces its own economic crash and Dow Jones flame-out. Worse, rocked by its worst Presidential scandal in all its 222-year history, the US enters this megalithic global predicament leaderless, politically paralysed and morally destitute. The decline of US world power, which has been going on since the 1950s, has speeded up furiously under Clinton. Now one has the sense of living at the end of an era.

No one who knows him believes Clinton will resign of his own accord. Many analysts fear that, wounded, disabled and profoundly distracted as he is, he will still seek to serve his full second term, through to 2000.

For all of us, the outlook could hardly be worse. On the one hand, we are confronted by a rapidly accelerating process of disintegration of the world’s entire financial system, conceivably the worst crisis this planet has known in all modern history, far beyond anything the general public or even the leading news media appear to recognise, and soon to be compounded and magnified by the Y2K/Millennium Bug disaster.

Against all that, it would be laughable, were it not so frightening, looking back to the hype of the early Clinton years. In his 1992 campaign book, Putting People First, Clinton promised America "the most ethical administration in the history of the Republic." Having warmed to the theme that he, Clinton, was virtue and goodness personified, his 1996 campaign ran a commercial that postured: "As Americans, there are some things we do simply and solely because they’re right and good." Some "ethical administration" they got.

While practising Kama Sutra with an emotionally unstable, overweight bimbo in the White House is not everyone’s idea of what one would expect of a President, factually that represents just one tiny portion of Clinton’s incredible crimes. It is not the titillating details of his bizarre affair with Lewinsky that should cause concern. There are many more serious problems here, all of them far more worthy of impeachment proceedings.

In the many violations of his presidential contract Clinton has established a pattern of felonies and vast crimes in which words like "treason," "malfeasance," "sedition" and "sellout" spring to mind. The Clintons and their assorted low-lifes had scarcely touched down in the White House before the crimes began.

There was abuse of power: the illegal firing of the entire White House travel staff because one of Clinton’s Hollywood buddies fancied the top job there. There was Filegate, the illegal acquisition and use of confidential FBI background files on Republicans. There was obstruction and cover-up of crimes, witness tampering and suppression of evidence as typified in the seemingly intentionally defective investigation of the supposed suicide by gunshot of House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster, found dead in the most mysterious circumstances in Fort Marcy Park, Washington, 20.7.93.

There was solicitation of perjury, tax evasion, bribing of witnesses, illegal futures trading, fraudulent land deals, laundering of drug money through a state agency, drug abuse all the way down to the illegal sale of a burial plot at Arlington Cemetery - America’s "Hero’s Acre."