Whatever works. But with friends saying things like this, who needs Clinton-haters?

"You are free to criticize him, to find his personal conduct distasteful," Charles Ruff, his White House lawyer -- one of the lawyers paid for by you and me -- told the Senate, reprising earlier remarks that reasonable people could reasonably conclude that the president is a liar.

This is the best Mr. Ruff could do and keep his self-respect -- lawyers insist they're entitled to that -- and it's an echo of the defenses thrown up by the president's dearest and best friends, who use words like "reprehensible," "contemptible," and "outrageous" to describe the man Americans have traditionally wanted their sons to grow up to be like. Murderers and rapists usually hear nicer things said about them by their lawyers.

David Kendall, the president's private lawyer, sounding as if he has been listening to too many Arkansas conspiracy tales, warned the senators of an "attempt to fit some of the facts into a sinister pattern." But Mr. Kendall, a dear friend of Hillary's since their New Haven days, wears the sour expression that suggests he smells something bad nearby. Maybe it's a colleague's bad breath, maybe it's something on Tom Harkin's shoes. Maybe it's just his client.

He sneered at the article of impeachment accusing Mr. Clinton of obstruction, dismissing it as "based on circumstantial evidence, and that evidence is at best profoundly ambiguous." He read Monica Lewinsky's testimony that "no one ever asked me to lie and I was never promised a job for my silence." And then he asked, "Is there something difficult to understand here?" He did not read the rest of Miss Lewinsky's answer: "I knew what he meant." Is there something difficult to understand here?

Dale Bumpers, the orator from Arkansas who demonstrated in his wind-up bloviation that Southerners know how to extract more than homemade whiskey from corn, got to give an unexpected last hurrah on the Senate floor.

"Oh, colleagues," he cried. "You have such an awesome responsibility." As a recently retired senator, he knows how senators like to have their secret and unmentionable places (ego, vanity, pride, conceit) scratched. He denounced the president as a cad and a cheat, a scoundrel and a bounder, a bum guilty of "a breach of his marriage vows" and a purveyor of a "terrible moral lapse," of inflicting pain, suffering and humiliation on his family. Who could blame him for wanting it on the record that, as he said, he was not there as Mr. Clinton's friend. He's only a former senator who happened to be in the neighborhood, a citizen concerned about setting a precedent by convicting Bill Clinton.

But trash or not, Bill Clinton is one clever dude. By proposing in his State of the Union speech the sovietizing of the American economy to "save" Social Security, he's thrown up targets he knows most Americans will gag on when they pay attention long enough to understand what's at stake. The Republican senators, ever eager to sing the soprano parts, anyway, will figure that continuing to snipe at Flem Snopes' grandson lets his radical economic proposals go unspiked.

Alan Greenspan, the actual author of the booming economy that President Clinton has had very little to do with, sounded the first warning on the morning after, that investing the Social Security billions in Wall Street would upset delicate market balances. Mr. Greenspan's remarks so upset Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee that some of them asked him if he would take back his words. He declined. "The political process makes it very difficult not to try to create some form of direction in the way those funds are invested," he said. Indeed, it takes no imagination to see how Mr. Clinton and his like-minded friends would use the Social Security billions to reward "good" companies and punish "bad" companies. He shuffled off to Buffalo to warn that Americans will spend their own money foolishly unless a wise and oppressive government keeps it.

Mr. Clinton knows his proposals would never fly, and maybe he doesn't even want them to. He knows, not that he particularly gives a damn, that the nation that has endured revolution, civil war, depression and two world wars is strong enough to endure two more years of a degenerate presidency. The South, which endured a mean-spirited Reconstruction as well, exacts its revenge at last for Abraham Lincoln's war.