The Clintons look good from a distance. As Yale Law School graduates they mastered the language and style of the mandarin class. It is only when you walk through the looking glass into the Arkansas underworld they came from that you begin to realise something is horribly wrong.
You learn that Bill Clinton grew up in the Dixie mafia stronghold of Hot Springs, and that his brother, Roger, was a convicted drug dealer who was once taped during under-cover surveillance saying "got to get some for my brother, he's got a nose like a vacuum cleaner". You learn about sworn testimony that links Clinton to cocaine smuggling in the early 1980s. You learn that Clinton's chief of security in Little Rock was gunned down in 1993 by assassins who seem to be enjoying immunity.
Oh, yes, and let us not forget the allegation that Bill and Hillary helped empty a bank called Madison Guaranty - but I will leave that to the special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr.
Bill Clinton is not the first president with the skeletons of the mob in his closet. Harry Truman, for instance, was a protege of the Pendergast crime machine in Kansas City. All you have to know about Bill Clinton is that he chose Patsy Thomasson - top lieutenant of convicted cocaine dealer Dan Lasater - to be his White House chief of personnel.
Once that has sunk in, you can start to understand how seriously this president has been compromised, and how much of a threat he could pose to the democratic system if allowed to get away with incremental abuse at a national level.
The Clintons wasted little time taking charge of the US Justice Department. All US Attorneys were asked to hand in their resignations. It was a move of breath-taking audacity, one that gave the Clintons control over the prosecutorial machinery of the federal government in every judicial district in the country.
They then set about eliminating the Director of the FBI, William Sessions, who was known for his refusal to countenance White House interference in the affairs of the Bureau. The post of FBI Director is supposed to be a 10-year appointment that puts it above politics. But Sessions was toppled in a Washington putsch, without a murmur of protest from America's press, and replaced by the hapless errand boy Louis Freeh. And I almost forgot, the Clintons installed their friend Webster Hubbell as "shadow" Attorney General - until Hubbell was jailed for Arkansas crimes.
When you are living through events day by day it is hard to know whether you are witnessing a historic turning point, or just mistaking the usual noise of politics for something meaningful. But there is no doubt that strange things have been going on in America.
The Clinton era has spawned an armed militia movement involving tens of thousands of people. The last time anything like this occurred was in the 1850s with the emergence of the southern gun clubs. It is easy to dismiss the militia as Right-wing nuts: it is much harder to read the complex sociology of civic revolt. At the very least the militias reveal the hatred building up against the irksome yuppies who run the country.
It is under this president that domestic terrorism has become a feature of life in America, culminating in the destruction of the Oklahama federal building on April 19, 1995. What set the deadly spiral in motion was the Waco assault two years before, and the cover-up that followed.
No official has ever lost a day's pay for precipitating the incineration of 80 people, most of them women and children, in the worst abuse of power since Wounded Knee a century ago. Instead of shame and accountability, the Clinton administration accused the victims of setting fire to themselves and their children, a posthumous smear that does not bear serious scrutiny. It then compounded the injustice by pushing for a malicious prosecution of the survivors.
Nothing does more to sap the life of a democracy than the abuse of power. Public trust is dangerously low. According to polls, barely a quarter of the American people now feel that they can count on the federal government to do the right thing.
A majority refuse to accept that Vincent Foster committed suicide, and they have good reason for their doubts. The paramedics and crime scene witnesses in Fort Marcy Park on July 20, 1993, tell a story that flatly contradicts the official findings. A police Polaroid shows a .22 calibre bullet wound in Foster's neck that the autopsy somehow failed to note. Are Americans to believe that Hillary Clinton's closest friend shot himself twice, with two different guns?
The Washington press corps has chosen not to report on this sort of thing, of course, because it always gives more weight to the utterings of an "official" source, with a title, than it does to the testimony of a common citizen. It has the matter backwards, in my opinion, because the "official" usually has the greater interest in lying.
Even so, the truth is getting out. Unauthorised stories are reaching the public through the samizdat links of the Internet and talk radio. From there it disseminates by word of mouth, spreading a thick layer of cynicism across the country.
Of all the bad things that Clinton has done to America, the worst is turning the FBI into a federal replica of the Arkansas State Police. Whether it is the persecution of dissident investigators in the air disasters of Pan Am 103 and TWA 800, or allowing the White House to peruse the secret files of political opponents, or the alledged intimidation of key witnesses in the Foster case, the FBI is starting to look like the enforcement arm of a police state.
The latest shocker is the decision to punish Frederic Whitehurst, the whistle-blower who first came forward with tales of corruption at the FBI crime labs. An internal inquiry has conceded that the lab tilted evidence "to incriminate the defendants" and cooked up the theory that a fertiliser bomb blew up the Oklahoma federal building after it found fertiliser at the house of a suspect, Terry Nichols. But the Justice Department seems more interested in denigrating Whitehurst, the lone hero of this sorry tale, than flagellating itself.
Look at the treatment of Carol Howe, the undercover informant who tracked the early stages of what appears to be the Oklahoma bombing conspiracy. The moment she surfaced as a threat to the "lone bomber" case against Timothy McVeigh, this January, she was indicted on criminal charges.
The FBI claims that she was dropped as an informant months before the bombing, but debriefing reports show the Bureau continued to receive her intelligence weeks after the blast. They also show that she named members of a neo-Nazi terrorist cell who had cased the Oklahoma federal building in December 1994 with the intention of bombing it. Yet the FBI did not follow up her reports. It conducted 26,000 witness interviews, most of them irrelevant, but could not find time to pursue the suspects who were specifically named by a paid informant.
This leaves the nasty suspicion that the FBI is shielding this neo-Nazi group in order to cover its own tracks. If it turns out that the bombing was a bungled sting operation by the FBI, as some of the victims are now alleging, the only fit response is to send bulldozers down Pennsylvania Avenue to flatten the Hoover Building once and for all.
A monument should be raised on the rubble of the FBI headquarters that reads Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? (Who Shall Guard the Guards?) as a warning to free-born Americans of the next millennium.
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