Falling Down and Falling Out

I have to admit it: cats make mistakes. For example, Scead - a fellow feline of my acquaintance - misjudged the distance between two tree branches and consequently fell to the ground. I frequently remind him of this - much to his irritation. I'm obliged to confess that I also made a mistake - although my error was not one of physical judgement, but rather of logic. In my last posting, I applied the premise that everything that the soothsayers utter is either gross exaggeration or sheer mendacity. Using this logical principle, I rashly assumed that the Liberationists had done exceedingly well in the recent elections - especially since they'd heralded their voting results as a momentous success. In view of this mistaken assumption I visited Clegge's house and left him a congratulatory token as an ingredient for his chorizos.

Since then, I've come to understand that they actually did take a hammering at the elections, so the soothsayers (for once) were correct. Serves me right for assuming that the Liberationists' assertions were factual. I'm going to have to revise my logical model, and come up with something more reliable. When soothsayers can't be trusted to lie continually, it makes life very difficult for me...

So. Blaeck Clegge - the Head Mangold-Wurzel of the Liberationists Faction and Second-In-Command of the Unholy Alliance - has been severely humiliated by the electorate in the local Witangemot council elections. The People Have Spoken: in their own bovine way, they've sent an uncoded message to the Liberationists that they don't rate their performance in the Northumbrian political arena very highly.

I wanted to find out why they had been so ignominiously defeated, so I asked Caedmon if he could give me some perspective. He shrugged, and suggested that perhaps it was because they were too enchanted by the allures of the Holy Roman Empire (which is neither holy, Roman nor an empire). Although I'm aware that the Liberationists are rabidly in favour of bringing the Kingdom to sink and drown in those corrupt, sewage-saturated waters, I'm not sure that their starry-eyed and groat-infused enthusiasm is the sole reason for their demise.

So I contacted Láréow - my eyes and ears in Caedmeron's lair - and asked him. I'm very impressed with his political insight: his new role as Chief Rat-befriender in Caedmeron's residence has done him a power of good. He told me that the Liberationists were an unprincipled bunch of chancers who didn't have a scruple between them. He said that Caedmeron has secretly admitted that nobody really knows what the Liberationists actually stand for - but for reasons best understood by psychiatric research, many people voted for them because they've always been there. Despite this, there must have been a lot of people who - having previously supported them because they wanted something different - had now voted against them. I asked Láréow why he thought this had happened.

He told me that they were a party who are very skilled at facing three different ways - depending on who their audience is. This makes them untrustworthy in the eyes of the electorate. He also told me that Clegge had made a specific promise to the comforter-sucking schoolchildren that he wouldn't raise the cost of their kindergarten fees. Ever.

They then wholeheartedly supported the Trees when they proposed an increase in kindergarten fees. They reneged on a solemn promise to The People. And now, Clegge has pledged to oppose the Trees in their deranged endeavours to reform the Northumbrian Herbalist Service. It sounds as if he - and his Liberationist colleagues - only have one principle - and that is to abandon it at all costs.

Jerks.