Scandal is the adrenalin of politics. There is nothing that quite so fires the partisan blood as the spectacle of the other party caught with its pants down. And that, both metaphorically and otherwise, is what we have had this week.
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I know there are serious matters at stake here – the documents left to mildew for five weeks, a foreign affairs minister sharing an orbit, whether tenuously or not, with a biker gang. But I suspect what really hurts the government, and drives Mr. Harper's formidable fury is that the whole mess is, finally, so silly. We may mutter on as much as we please about “state secrets” or “grave harm to our allies” and all that, but really this whole business is foolish.
It is silly, and “silly” is the one characteristic we never thought to drape over the Harper administration. But it projects something even more deadly for the Prime Minister. It shows how alone he is. Alone in this sense: that once you get past the picture of the Prime Minister himself, his obvious intelligence and capacity, and raise the question of who on his front bench is his equal or near equal, the answer is no one.
And how is this point best illustrated? Well, not the least of the ironies that dance in their legion around l'affaire Bernier is that when Mr. Harper looked to find an immediate stand-in he went to … David Emerson. That's correct, the very man who on the night of his election victory in Vancouver as a Liberal so splendidly pledged to be, and I quote, “Stephen Harper's worst nightmare.”
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