If only Bill Clinton had kept that digit in his pocket - that index finger that jabbed home each righteously indignant syllable: "I did NOT. Have a SEXUAL relationship. With that WOMAN."
Placed alongside the endless, mewling backpedalling of recent days, that image is hard to shake and fairly nauseating. "Lying is an accursed vice," wrote Montaigne. "It is only our words which bind us together and make us human."
But to lie is human too. Which of us - bishop or bank manager - has never lied about a sexual matter? "Obviously, sexual buccaneers who want to succeed in American politics must lie all the time," writes Gore Vidal in his memoir, Palimpsest, "and I do not think that Montaigne would have objected to this sort of protective lying in a society whose mores one must pretend to honor in order to survive."
Vidal was writing, not about Bill Clinton, but about John F. Kennedy. By the age of 25, both he and Jack had had about a thousand sexual encounters (Vidal with men, Jack with women). Unlike Jack, Vidal never got VD. Those were the days when presidents had a private life and never had to look on their secret servicemen as potential prosecution witnesses.
Lyndon Johnson, whose secretarial pool was known as the "harem", had sex with one employee on a White House table. Furious about the sexual legend growing around his predecessor, he once thumped the table and yelled: "I had more women by accident than Kennedy had on purpose."
Warren Harding was caught having sex with young Nancy Britton in a White House closet. And the Roosevelt Room where Bill lied through his teeth is named after a president who suffered a fatal stroke in the company of his mistress, Lucy Mercer. During the filthy presidential campaign of 1884, grown men pushed prams up and down chanting "Ma, Ma, Where's my Pa" to embarrass Grover Cleveland, who had fathered a non-marital child. It didn't work: Cleveland was elected anyway.
So no change there. What has changed is the degree of self-justification engaged in by politicians and the media to justify intrusiveness or its opposite. The legendary Watergate editor of the Washington Post and friend of JFK, Ben Bradlee, writes that it was only after his sister-in-law, Mary Pinchot Meyer, was murdered (a few months after Kennedy and without apparent motive), that he discovered that she had been one of Kennedy's lovers.
"It is important to say that I never for a moment considered reporting that it had been learned that the slain president had in fact had a lover, who had herself been murdered while walking on the C & O Canal. (Never mind the fact that the CIA's most controversial counterintelligence specialist had been caught in the act of breaking and entering, and looking for her diary).
"Mary Meyer's murder was news, not her past love affair, I thought then, and part of me would like to think so now. The oldfashioned part of me, pre-prurience, precelebrification, pre-`Hard Copy'."
That was then. The rules changed with Gary Hart, a dead ringer for Clinton in the annals of world-beating, reckless stupidity; the presidential candidate who challenged the press to follow him and then obliged them with pictures of Donna Rice in his lap.
In a tortuous self-examination, Bradlee now asks if Hart was a victim of a prurient press or of his own excesses. Had the rules changed, and if so, who changed them? How come Hart was the object of such press scrutiny, when LBJ and Jack Kennedy had escaped? Yes, is his answer, the rules had changed and without formal agreement by any of the participants.
By the 1980s, the sexual revolution had changed American society permanently and an interest in everyone's sexual proclivities, especially those of the burgeoning world of celebrities, was becoming the norm, whetted by the tabloids and tabloid television. Add to that the fact that the press, still smarting about accusations of covering up Kennedy's "fooling around, had silently decided that they were never going to be accused of covering up the fooling around of any subsequent candidate. If Hart was the victim of anything", concludes Bradlee, "he was the victim of these new rules".
Media ethics are further illustrated by the response to the Hart affair of one George Reedy, a journalism professor. "What counts with a candidate for president is his character, and nothing shows it like his relationship with women. Here you have a man who is asking you to trust him with your bank account, your children, your life and your country for four years. If his own wife can't trust him, what does that say?"
Worthy stuff indeed, until you remember that Reedy was once press secretary to Lyndon Johnson - that's right, the man with the "harem". And that Richard Nixon was considered entirely trustworthy in sexual matters. It might be funny but for the possible outcome (a scenario which may yet see George Bush's son installed in the White House).
The upshot of the new media "rules" - forged by an industry driven downward by competition in prurient curiosity - is that we now know far more about people's tawdry sex lives than we want to or need to. The "rules" have claimed their ultimate victim and needled a President into lying about his private life. And the irony is that though most ordinary Americans long since said to hell with the media rules when it came to private matters, neither their elected politicians nor supposed media betters were able to keep pace.
In Washington, a place bilious with what Primary Colours author, Joe Klein, describes as "myopic righteousness", commentators mired themselves in their self-importance, sure that the public would soon share their obsessions. But the public wouldn't play.
Feminists who declined to play up to the media stereotype of Victorian avengers and refused to condemn Clinton's behaviour were branded as hypocrites. (Does it need repeating that the private behaviour of consenting adults - however repugnant - is no-one else's business? Or that a woman who keeps a semen-stained dress for years and poses for Vanity Fair on the strength of it might not be what constitutes a feminist role model?).
Senator Joseph Lieberman, spot-on last week in his description of the public mood as "sadness" and "outrage", missed it completely when he proclaimed that "the reality in 1998 is that a president's private life is public. . .Contemporary news standards will have it no other way". Now that , as abject surrenders go, is surely sad and outrageous.
So what was it all about? Stupidity?
A former high-ranking administration official says as much about Clinton to Joe Klein in the current issue of the New Yorker: "I'm mad as hell. Here you had the most tactical risk-averse President we've ever had - all that polling and markettesting. . . And at the same time. . .he takes these huge, absurd personal risks and throws it all away. You know, you hear the same comment over and over from working people: `He's an asshole'. Well, I'm with them."
But Bill's flawed humanity is only a part of the truth. Klein delves deeper, quoting a century-old saying of Lord Bryce: "When political controversy is languid, personal issues come to the front."
In the peaceful, prosperous 1990 without the grit of true political controversy, what are people left to talk about except - as Gore Vidal once remarked in the Observer - "sex, the flag, the foetus and, in the good old days, Communism?"
On another level, Klein is inclined to the view of Rene Girard, the Stanford literature and religion scholar. Girard has written a book about scapegoating and sees Clinton as a classic scapegoat, not in the sense that he is an innocent victim but in that he personifies the pathologies of his time: "It is possible to see in Bill Clinton all that his accusers loathe about themselves: the triumph of marketing over substance, the guilt about the sexual excesses of the past quarter century, the selfhatred of a generation reared in prosperity and never tested by adversity."
Stand by for the ritual sacrifice.