”No one imagines that the Senate will come close to obtaining the two-thirds majority needed to convict the President and remove him from office,” The New York Times asserted on Dec. 13, in a ”Week in Review” piece by David E. Rosenbaum.

In case anyone had missed the point, The Times repeated it the next day, in a news report by Adam Clymer.

Wrong. Actually, I’d put the odds of removal (or forced resignation) at about one in three.

These latest exercises in wishful thinking recall the front-page assertion by The Times on April 2 that ”it is now politically inconceivable that Congress will consider impeachment.” That was in a ”news analysis” by John M. Broder.

In fact, President Clinton may well be ousted, as people focus more on the facts, the law, and the dangers of having a crippled President for more than two years. Public opinion, which appears to be moving already, could come to favor resignation or removal so decisively as to touch off a wave of Democratic calls for Clinton to go. That would set the stage for his trial, conviction, and removal by a solidly bipartisan Senate vote if he won’t spare us the trouble by resigning.

A Senate trial would be far shorter (a few days or at most weeks of floor proceedings), and less traumatic and pornographic, than the White House and its media allies would like us to think. In this scenario, Al Gore would probably become President sometime in February.

To get the flavor of President Clinton’s long-awaited, 184-page, definitive defense against charges of criminality and impeachable offenses, let’s turn to page 77.

That’s where the Clinton brief seeks to explain away a succession of sworn statements he made during his Jan. 17 deposition in the Paula Jones case, which claimed that while he may have ”exchange(d) a few words” with Monica Lewinsky ”once or twice” when she brought things to the Oval Office, he had no specific recollection of ever being alone with her in any room in the White House.

What says the President now that we all know he had some 10 sexual encounters with Lewinsky in various rooms in the Oval Office complex?

The Clinton brief, released on Tuesday, begins by asserting that this particular perjury charge hinges on ”the incorrect premise that the President testified that he was never alone with Ms. Lewinsky.” False. That’s not the charge, and Clinton’s lawyers know it.

Then the Clinton brief quotes a question and answer from the deposition, truncating both with apparent intent to deceive: ”For example, the President answered ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Your testimony is that it was possible, then, that you were alone with her . . . ?’ ”

Here’s the actual question and answer, in which I have italicized the critical words that Clinton’s lawyers chose to delete.

Q: ”So I understand, your testimony is that it was possible, then, that you were alone with her, but you have no specific recollection of that ever happening?”

A: ”Yes, that’s correct. It’s possible that she, in, while she was working there, brought something to me and that at the time she brought it to me, she was the only person there. That’s possible.”

Amid the breathtaking buffoonery and mendacity of many of the House Judiciary Committee’s Democrats, some honest and thoughtful arguments against impeachment were set forth, at long last, at a hearing on Tuesday.

The strongest of them came from Rep. Barney Frank (D- Mass.) and three law professors, Jeffrey Rosen and Stephen Saltzburg of George Washington University and (alas) Alan M. Dershowitz of Harvard, late of the O.J. Simpson defense team. It’s worth reflecting on whether their best points should sway any House members who may be planning to vote their consciences.

Frank argued that ”we erode privacy” when we allow anyone who files a lawsuit to compel the president (or anyone else) to answer under oath questions about ”intimate details of (his) life” that are ”peripheral” to the lawsuit. The implication was that the seriousness of President Clinton’s lies at his Jan. 17 deposition in the Paula Jones lawsuit was mitigated by the unwarranted intrusiveness of the laws under which he was questioned.

That seems right. It would be even righter had Frank not voted in 1994 for a new law making it easier for sexual harassment plaintiffs to force defendants to answer questions about suspected sexual activities with others in the workplace.

Dershowitz extended Frank’s theme by noting that ”the least culpable genre of false statements are those that deny embarrassing personal conduct of marginal relevance to the matter at issue.” He also said that perjury is rampant; that it is committed by thousands of law enforcement officers every year; that ”the overwhelming majority” of perjurers are not prosecuted; and that ”the sad reality appears to be that most people care about perjury only when they disapprove of the substance of the lie or of the person who is lying.”

”When we saw Osama bin Laden carry out that bombing attack in Africa, we sent a very strong message by going after his colleagues, and himself, hopefully, in Afghanistan. We weren’t (able) . . . to hit as many terrorists as we wanted, but we sent a message.” So said Defense Secretary William S. Cohen on Oct. 13, to U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, with regard to the Aug. 20 cruise missile attack on terrorist camps at Khost, Afghanistan.

As James Risen of The New York Times deduced from this and other evidence: ”One of the clear but unstated objectives of last August’s raid on Afghanistan was to kill Osama bin Laden and as many of his lieutenants as possible . . .”

Meanwhile, President Clinton vowed on Nov. 15 to ”intensify” U.S. efforts to help Iraqi rebels bring about ”a new government” in Baghdad–a consummation most unlikely to occur except over Saddam Hussein’s dead body.

Such statements come a bit closer than ever before to official acknowledgment that the United States has tried to kill a foreign leader for acts of war against this country. This has some in Congress and others wondering whether the 1976 presidential order that bars ”assassination” has become–or should become–inoperative.

The answer is no. But the questions are likely to persist, given that the simultaneous spread of terrorism and of weapons of mass destruction poses an ever-growing danger, one severe enough to sometimes justify the pre-emptive killing of terrorists overseas.

One reason for the current confusion is that the deliberately (and usefully) vague assassination ban has never been as broad or as legally binding as is widely supposed. It has never meant that the United States will not use lethal force in response to attacks by foreign enemies.

The celebrated historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., assuring a House Judiciary subcommittee on Nov. 9 that Congress cannot constitutionally impeach President Clinton for his ”disgraceful” lies, distilled the essence of his scholarly advice into one short sentence: ”Gentlemen always lie about their sex lives.”

Always. Even when ordered by a judge to answer a sexual harassment plaintiff’s questions under oath. Even to a criminal grand jury. Even when the lie falsely brands as a liar and a head case the lady whose reputation the gentleman presumably wishes to protect.

It also appears that sex is not the only thing about which gentlemen lie–or, let’s say (after all, we’re all gentlemen here), fib. Sometimes they fib about history.

Consider the press release issued on Oct. 28 by Schlesinger and two other eminent co-sponsors on behalf of more than 400 (mostly liberal) historians and constitutional scholars. It contained just one assertion of historical fact: ”Under our Constitution, impeachment of the president is . . . explicitly reserved . . . for high crimes and misdemeanors in the exercise of executive power.”

False. The Constitution specifies no such thing. The last six words quoted above–”in the exercise of executive power”– appear nowhere in any of the provisions regarding impeachment. Nor do they appear in any of the records of the constitutional convention. Nor was the impeachment power ever construed so narrowly by leading scholars before 1998, when liberals mobilized to palliate President Clinton’s perjuries and alleged obstruction of justice.

What do liberal causes such as hate-crime laws and the London detention of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet have in common with conservative causes such as the Defense of Marriage Act and harsh mandatory prison terms for drug offenders?

All of these measures are championed by politicians who hope to do well by making certain constituencies feel good. And all of these measures are likely to do nothing–or worse than nothing–for the people they purport to help. All of them have unhealthy side effects. And all, except for the Pinochet snatching, are embraced by President Clinton.

Feel-good politics is not new. But it seems ever more potent at a time when so many voters’ views on public issues come through the quarter-inch-deep medium of television–rather than through reading, reflection and reasoning–and when so many politicians shape their principles by poll results.

Take the current campaign to expand federal hate-crime laws to cover crimes motivated by homophobia. This was spurred by the understandable public desire to ”do something” to express outrage at the sadistic robbery-murder of Matthew Shepard, allegedly by two gay-bashing thugs, in Wyoming.

Largely lost in the noise–on television, at least–were three reasons for concluding that the proposed legislation was an irrational response to the murder: First, there is no evidence that even a single crime would be prevented by new hate-crime legislation. Existing laws are entirely adequate to punish those who murder and assault, whatever the motives; Shepard’s killers could get the death penalty under Wyoming law. And there is no evidence that state authorities anywhere, today, systematically condone crimes motivated by homophobia, as many once condoned crimes motivated by racism.

President Clinton’s lawyers have rested his defense not on any serious contention that he is innocent of the perjuries and other crimes alleged in Kenneth Starr’s report, but on the argument that even if he is guilty, impeachment would violate the spirit of the Constitution.

The Framers, suggest Clinton’s lawyers and an extended gaggle of liberal law professors, excluded such conduct as lying about sex from the category of impeachable offenses. This has a veneer of plausibility: The Constitution lists only ”treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” as grounds for impeachment, and the president’s lies about making it with the office help don’t seem very ”high.”

On inspection, however, this argument falls apart. Nothing in the Constitution, the Framers’ debates, or the precedents justifies reading ”high crimes and misdemeanors” so narrowly as to exclude crimes such as perjury and witness tampering, even if they grow out of private matters.

The impeachment provisions were adopted by the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in accordance with James Madison’s assertion that it was ”indispensable” to guard against presidential ”incapacity, negligence or perfidy.” An early draft listed only ”treason and bribery” as grounds for impeachment. George Mason, stressing that this would not reach ”many great and dangerous offenses,” moved to add ”or maladministration.” Madison objected that ”so vague a term will be equivalent to a tenure during pleasure of the Senate.” Mason then substituted ”treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” And that was that.

Which two people in Washington most dread the possibility of Al Gore’s becoming president through the removal or forced resignation of President Clinton?

One of them is Bill Clinton. The other is Newt Gingrich. If Gingrich is the win-at-any-cost, right-wing partisan the Clinton camp says he is (and I have no reason to doubt it), he would much rather have Clinton hanging around the Democrats’ necks in November 2000 than have a fully empowered President Gore running as an incumbent.

These thoughts suggest the outlines of an unholy marriage of convenience, with Clinton and his diehard defenders working toward the same outcome sought by the most cynically partisan Republicans. That outcome–a crippled president hanging on until Jan. 20, 2001–could be very bad for the country. But it would be arguably good for Republican partisans, and definitely good for Clinton.

Why good for Clinton? Because the current drama has only three conceivable outcomes, the first of which seems improbable now and may become inconceivable within a month:

1. President Clinton survives in office, following some sort of congressional censure, with Congress and the nation agreeing to put his crimes behind us and to support him as an adequate, if personally flawed, leader.

2. The president survives, but in such a weakened state that he can get virtually nothing through Congress and has little hope of rallying the nation to take the kind of difficult or costly steps that may be necessary to meet a crisis. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans press unending investigations into alleged misconduct by the president on various fronts, with high hopes of sweeping the presidency as well as both chambers of Congress in the 2000 election.

As the impeachment pot simmers, the possibility that Vice President Al Gore could also find himself facing criminal charges has some Republicans salivating and some Democrats in a cold sweat.

But the legal clouds hanging over Gore–in the form of two 90-day ”preliminary investigations” now being conducted by the Justice Department–do not, on close inspection, seem all that dark. Despite some ominous suggestions that ”this time, his legal problems may be much more serious,” as The Washington Post put it on Aug. 30, Gore’s real risk of facing indictment or impeachment actually seems quite small.

It is possible that Gore will be assigned his very own independent counsel in late November to look into the narrow question of whether he lied last Nov. 12 to Justice Department officials investigating his dialing-for-dollars from the White House. Such a lie would be a serious federal crime even though Gore was not under oath. But analysis of the known facts suggests that there is no clear proof that he lied. Unless some emerges, any competent independent counsel would quickly decide not to prosecute.

Gore is also one of several subjects of a far broader investigation, into whether President Clinton and the entire top echelon of the Clinton-Gore campaign–and, for that matter, the Dole-Kemp campaign too–systematically schemed to violate various campaign finance laws. Attorney General Janet Reno is under mounting pressure to seek an independent counsel on that front by mid-December. But even if a counsel is appointed, the process seems unlikely to lead to criminal charges against either Clinton or Gore. Nor should it.

Here’s the basis for these conclusions:

A woman asked Benjamin Franklin in 1787 what the Framers had created at the Constitutional Convention. His reply: ”A republic–if you can keep it.”

Franklin’s words resonate today. Two extraordinary events occurred this week. Both shed light on the health of what the Constitution calls our ”republican form of government.” The first was salubrious (if premature): the release of President Clinton’s videotaped testimony before the Starr grand jury, providing a remarkable opportunity for all Americans to judge whether their president had committed impeachable offenses.

The second event was profoundly disturbing (if unsurprising): The instant reaction to the Clinton testimony by media elites–who style themselves guardians of the Republic, educators of the masses, and tribunes of truth–was little short of decadent.

What mattered most in the Clinton testimony and the other material released this week was not the fresh porn that the press so happily deplored–and what dreary, dull porn it was–but the fresh evidence of his criminality. What mattered was whatever evidentiary light was shed on the question of whether he has committed (and is still committing) impeachable offenses.

This obvious point has escaped the press. It has also escaped much of the public, in part because the press abdicated its claimed educational role while implicitly advocating government by plebiscite. Even respected newspapers reviewed Clinton’s testimony not as evidence but as a theatrical performance. Most barely took note of the powerful proof, witnessed nationwide by the American people, that the president had repeatedly committed one of the most serious crimes charged in Starr’s report: perjury to a criminal grand jury.