Beware
the
Ides of March

It was a dark and stormy afternoon in Tangiers.  I took refuge from the pelting rain under a storefront awning, hoping that if I just wished hard enough, the rare downpour would soon end.  As I watched the parade of wet smelly people walking in both directions, there came a low, sweet voice which seemed to be all around me at once,               

"Read your political fortune, Sahib?  Political Futures foretold.  100% guaranteed.  First Reading Free...... Confusion resolved, Clarity assured..... The cards never lie...."

Lost in Time, lost fool, I hurried inside the magic shop.  The gypsy sat in a cloud of incense, amid objects of eerie cast: a skull, colored bottles, weirdly twisted roots, dried mushrooms, jewels, bones, fearful things of every supernatural color and stripe.

"Sit down, let me read your Political Tarot ^{©®™ *} 

"Don't be afraid ....."

She shuffled the cards many ways, then laid them out slowly, one at a time .....         

"Julian Epstein, the fork-tongued dragon ..... Lanny Davis, the smirking parrot ..... Eleanor Clift, the Living Cadaver ..... Jesse Jackson, house black .....John Podesta, Captain of the Elite Guard ..... Ellen Ratner, Subterranean Non-Entity ..... Julianne Malveaux, the alligator/ape ..... Joe Conason,  the snarling beast ..... Molly Ivins, cancerous male impersonator ..... Gene Lyons, envious beta male ..... Kiki Moore, sarcastic apologist ..... Maxine Waters, race mad imbecile ..... Katie Couric, celebrity socialist ..... Judy Woodruff, CNN's pet propaganda skank .....         

"And now for the Major Arcana ..... "  She shuffled the deck again, then laid out several more cards.  "Ah, the Race Card ..... and the Privacy Card ..... the Spin card ..... then Free Speech ..... GUILT, and finally ..... DEATH.  Whew, what an ominous, evil spread! Yet much good will come of it!"          

"Yea, but what does it all mean?  What's gonna happen?"

She took a moment to gather her thoughts, then heaved a great slow sigh as the meaning came to her.  "Listen carefully," she said.        

"For the last 8 years, a huge cadre of professional Information Criminals have been deceiving you, and all of America too.  They've mislead you about the unimportance of "Character," the inequality of lying under oath and open perjury, the irrelevance of sexual infidelity; they've claimed that women who cry "Rape!" or "Sexual Harassment!" are nuts, or sluts, or stalkers, or white trash.  They've told you that Bad is Good and that Good is just plain Evil.         

"These lies are a kind of Political Pollution, a terrible Poisoning of our common cultural Information Pool.  These people, in the angry, desperate defense of their precious Rapist-in-Chief, have caused untold damage to our social fabric, defining deviance down to where the perverts are the good guys and the wholesome people are dangerous fools.          

"The resulting harm is so ruinous that the Cosmos itself demands an accounting.  They will be forced to pay for the lies they've spread.  Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day the price will come due.  They may be walking around on borrowed time right now, but sooner or later their evil debts will surely be called up for final payment, as were the malevolent iniquities of Julius Caesar and Rasputin.  Their careers might fizzle into nothingness, or maybe protestors will show up wherever they go to speak.  Investment funds may be angrily withdrawn from their publishers and sponsors, or maybe someone will just recognize them in the supermarket and blow their dishonorable heads off."                 

She leaned toward me and whispered, "BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH!! Get out of town, take a trip, whatever.  Have a good alibi, because that's the day when their poop is most likely to hit the fan.  You don't wanna be around to be blamed for what happens to these enemies of the Truth. And whatever you do, don't warn them.  They deserve whatever they get.  Now go, and do what I've told you to do.  That's all I'm allowed to say. The spirits have gone."       

I walked out into the street.  The rain had stopped.  Everything was clean and clear to me, I felt absolutely great.  Happy and optimistic.

As much as we all hoped, when he left office, that Bill Clinton would just go crawl down a big slimy hole with Monica Lewinsky and ejaculate his remaining years away until the day when Hillary would come by and fill in the hole with the unspeakably foul cottage cheese-like crap that she packs into the seat of her pants, his "pardons for sale" scandal is keeping him in the news and in the public eye well past our political patience threshold.  Is he never going to stop soiling the Presidency?  Will we have to live through three more decades to come, watching him defile the ex-Presidency as well?                 

There might be some comedy to that, Slick Willie setting up an office in jail, all his workplace sexual conquests protesting just outside his cell, throwing trash and rotten fruit in through the window.  Adjoining cells where he could go for conjugal visits with Denise Rich and a thousand other wealthy Liberal bimbos.  Phone meetings with world leaders from solitary confinement.  Adoring octogenarians like Gina Davis, Madonna, Julia Roberts, and Barbara Streisand applauding wildly when he's released, offering him book deals and gratuitous sexual favors.  All on television of course, thanks to a lucrative exclusive contract with the MTV network.       

But there's an element in these latest scandals that isn't so funny: the usual Clintonian Info-Criminals are rising up out of the sewers again to defend every Slick Willie indiscretion in sight.  All the people who have lied to us and carried both Clintons' water down through the years are back, trying again to turn LIES into TRUTHS.  

In the same way that you can't yell "Fire" in a crowded auditorium, like you can't pour paint down a well in the name of "Art," you can't just willy-nilly pollute our common social grammar, the invisible infrastructure of our culture, with utter lies.  Society runs on and depends on accurate information, important decisions are based on the guarantee that everyone else will abide by the common information-contract :  Life on Earth functions well because people tell each other the TRUTH.  Truth makes the World go 'round. 

And when you lie to the world, the world wobbles, then spins in oddly wrong ways.  Everything is upset, everything gets screwy, people believe false things, they make wrong choices.                

These lies are InfoCrimes.  Plain and Simple.     

And the people who spin the lies are criminals, just as plain and simple.  They will be punished.  The Political balancing mechanism of the Cosmos will see to the details.                

           It's in The Cards

* Political Tarot a registered intellectual property wholly owned by D. Keller and Trilobyte Magazine.