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The Impeachment Chronicles
This series of articles was written more or less
contemporaneously with the events that led to President Clinton's impeachment
and acquittal in 1998 and 1999. I picked up the thread about a month before
the President's mid-August grilling by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr
and lost interest during the anticlimatic period following the actual impeachment
as some of Clinton's political adversaries, caught in the riptides of their own righteousness, began
to resign with silent hypocrisy or public shame due before they were pulled under for good.
However long the moral circus was to continue, at that point none of the
indicators I was following seemed to indicate much of any substance would
happen. It didn't, as after a few ceremonious weeks of the morally-bescarred
Henry Hyde lumbering before a gaggle of small men with toneless eyes
forth and then back and then forth across the capital rotunda to carry
out their prosecution, a somewhat embarrassed Senate couldn't muster enough
Republican votes even to validate their quest with a simple majority, let
alone the two-thirds vote necessary to convict the wayward President.
The reason I followed this series of events in
such detail is that I felt it was a perfect opportunity to study (in vivo
in the body politic) what I have since come to call the "king must die"
complex, a set of associations between various planets and points that
seem to accompany emotionally and politically charged efforts to bring
down someone of stature, whether through abdication, impeachment or assassination. In the chronicles, I don't quiet apprehend the full scope of this complex, but making these observations did enable me to get some idea of how it works, how it times events, and which planets are involved. My current thoughts on the subject can be found in the Epilogue.
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