And coming right on the heels of all those reassessments of your Presidency, Bill, with the pundits for the most part looking charitably on your term in office—giving you B-pluses and such. Many even surmising that in time your peccadilloes might be forgotten and your achievements and political savvy remembered. Then you have to go and do something so, you know, tacky, hoping we wouldn't notice in all the rush.

Wow! Forget that guy Rich, you even had the Weather Underground in there. Something to offend everyone. It's almost admirable. Almost.

Here I am moralizing about a scoundrel when his very scoundrility is what makes him what he is. It’s his glory. To say that he and Hillary should have departed the White House with quiet dignity and just left all that stuff behind is to want something from them that would be against their true natures.

It's sort of an animal fable, like the one told by Orson Welles in Mr. Arkadin. A scorpion implores a frog to carry him across a river. The frog objects that the scorpion will sting him, but the scorpion allays his fears by pointing out that if he did they both would die. They start out across the river. Halfway across, the frog feels a sharp pain in his back and knows he's been stung. "Why did you do that?" the frog asks perplexed as they both begin to drown. "I couldn't help myself," says the scorpion, "it's my nature."

Which is why conventional evaluations of Bill's presidency are beside the point. All the hand-wringing about how he could have been a truly great president—if only. If only he hadn't done this, if only he hadn't done that. But against all sense, all reason, all that was at stake, the stinker screwed up. Big time.

It’s the nature of the beast. If it had been his plan all along to become a sensible, stay-the-course president, and these calamities had just befallen him out of the blue—that would be bad luck. But what if it was, yes, your fate to fuck up? To sink yourself in the deepest, messiest hole you can contrive and then Houdini-like, pull yourself out of it and rise again to an even dizzier height from which to crash and burn yet again. And, by golly, you did just that.

You've no sooner extricated yourself from that Gennifer Flowers business—and they’re actually playing the tapes of you at your most weasely on TV—than it’s on to Travelgate, Filegate, and VinceFostergate, and no sooner have you pulled out of that fiasco then you’re tumbling down the White Water gap. You’ve capsized, rolled over the rapids but somehow managed to swim ashore when Paula Jones shows up with some pretty revealing diagrams of the family jewels. But, Bill, you were saving the best one for last, weren’t you?

You did what in the Oval Office? Oh, man, you’re really in the dog house this time. You've messed up so bad that people are actually holding their breath. The suspense reaches fever pitch—how can he ever show his face again? How will he get out of it this time? The whole sinister weight of the vast right wing conspiracy falls on his head like a ton of bricks. He's a goner! He's washed up for sure! And then, right before your eyes, like a cartoon character flattened by a steamroller, he unpeels himself from the floor and boing! he's back, friskier than ever.

The Comeback Kid is only truly happy when he’s fighting for his life against all odds. And that's one of the reasons he remains so popular in spite of all the absolutely outrageous things he's done. It's because he's a classic American type, the classic American type actually. The confidence man, the huckster, the loveable scoundrel.

In the typology of cartoons, Reagan and Bush II are Mickey Mouse and Elmer Fudd. But Mickey Mouse is strictly Disneyland stuff. After you’re about five years old you start looking around for characters with a little edge to them—I mean would Mickey have thumbed his nose at George III (not the one who’s Jeb Bush’s son)? Would Elmer have dumped tea in Boston Harbor? Bill is more like Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck. Rascals and walking disasters. You may say that they’re dethpicable, but, hey, they’re the fun ones, the ones you like to watch, and they’re what the U.S. of A. is all about, right?