While we're trying to figure out just what in Whitewater we're supposed to be so all-fired upset about, there's another, less attended little bother developing - the possibility that we might soon be embroiled in nuclear war.
Oh, that.No amount of congressional energy or public attention is too great to expend in trying to sort out the past venalities of Arkansas' business and political interests.
Korea, however, is remote and although the issue there could kill us, some of us anyway, it just doesn't titillate.
President Clinton inherited this mess, and he has handled it about as well as you could expect - which is to say, not very well at all.
The United States has few levers on North Korea, and those it does have are weak; they can't be pulled very hard without breaking.
Perhaps it was partly because of that - and certainly it was because the worst couldn't happen on their own watches - that presidents Reagan and Bush fiddled while Pyongyang yearned for The Bomb.
The warnings had been obvious for years, culminating with the refusal of President Kim Il-sung to let the International Atomic Energy Agency inspect North Korea's supposedly peaceful nuclear sites.
Now Kim threatens war against South Korea as a response to even such a mild move as the U.S. decision to let South Korea have surface-to-air Patriot missiles as a partial shield.
Any attack on South Korea would catch U.S. troops and interests in the middle, and North Korean threats can't be shrugged off as braggadocio. The regime is militant, deeply estranged from international norms and caught up in fantasies of its own power.
The United States is doing what it can - applying steady pressure, increased in measured increments, and hoping that China, the only nation with any kind of handle on North Korea, will help.
Beijing cannot relish the development of even a small nuclear competitor next door, or the regional instability that would follow from that for years.
Neither can the world, for the implications spread far beyond the Korean peninsula.
Once again, the nuclear genie threatens to break fully free from its bottle. It already has an arm and a leg out.
The first generation of atomic actors - the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China - has since been joined, though unadmittedly, by India, Israel and Pakistan. (South Africa scrapped its program as a costly irrelevancy.)
The breakup of the Soviet Union has left nuclear missiles in three independent republics. Iran is believed to be sneaking up on nuclear capacity, a la North Korea, and Iraq's Saddam Hussein still dreams of lovely mushroom clouds.
North Korea is shaping up less as a test of U.S. resolve - that seems sound enough within its limited means - than of international resolve.
The international community, lazy and skittish, already has failed to act convincingly against brutish miniwars in the Serbian manner. More now seem certain. The Korean challenge asks whether, having blown that one, the world community at least will act to prevent their nuclear prosecution.