Quelle surprise. Stephen Harper's inquisition into the Schrieber-Mulrooney blinko game (lame Price Is Right reference to you none TV gameshow watchers) is going to be done on a thin wedge.
We wouldn't want to get nitty gritty on this because it just might splatter mud on some 'innocent victims', yah, that's the ticket.
But let's go back and follow our so-called leader Stephen Harper's trajectory on this thing:
1) with the opposition smelling something akin to blood, Harper threatens the Liberals with a "Don't dare me to look, because I'll give you a wedgie and you won't like me when I give wedgies."
2)Wearing jailbird stripes (but his pants up at least), Karlheinz S. sings like a canary facing extradition to Sylvester's hideaway. He mentions that for nearly a year he's waited for his good friend Britan, er Brian, to put in a good word with the current so-called PM, that Harper guy that the Germans would have liked if he hadn't already filled his dance card with American Oilmen. Once that hits the newswire, the so-called leader tries his second Trudeau-esque piro-ette (Income Trusts still warms the cockles of many deceivers' hearts) and now says there's a need for an inquiry.
To help cover his tracks, and make people forget his open threat 'to investigate Louis St. Laurent's shockingly high starched collar bills', Harper puts his puppet gallery on a 'no-Mulroney, not even Benny' fly zone.
3)A Committee is formed and parliamentarians from the opposition benches find that the Justice minister, one of the few surviving Mulroney men left, to be less than cooperative when it comes to guaranteeing that Karlheinz, pants and all, will be kept in Canada to do his rummaging through boxes bit. But eventually, it gets done and the committee faces both of questionable character. It's enough to make one of Canada's vanguard leaders of conservative thought question the existence of a higher power, like John A Macdonald.
4) So-called leader Harper assigns respected University prez David Johnston with the task of deciding if there is to be an inquiry and its perameters -- nothing like letting someone else be 'the decider'. It buys Harper time to work on his hockey tome.
5) Johnston says Yay on the inquiry, but chooses to limit the area of question to 4:12 pm Tuesday March 3rd 1993 and 7:39 am Wednesday March 4th 1993, or something to that effect. Harper celebrates by breaking out the leather cowboy costume for Laureen -- which he'd prefer to see in the newspaper again rather than this and this. But the Spanish Mulroney-Karlheinz 1993 Inquisition will have to wait until the parliamentary committee is finished cribbing CBC reporters' notebooks, which could take a few months.
Of course, much of the public's interest is in if Mulroney should be forced to repay that 2.1 million settlement, which rested on his sworn testimony that he knew a Karlheinz, but he was taller and never ever handed over envelopes stuffed with thousand dollar bills that could be hid in a US safety deposit box.
Fortunately, Mulroney hasn't had to testify under oath yet, leaving many fun-filled days ahead for political junkies, millions of Canadians who still curse the word Mulroney whenever they see Canadian Idol advertisment, and the starved dogs of the media and opposition.
For one of the better rundowns on the whole wacky affair, go here or here.
2 comments:
The thin wedge, if you'll recall, was what started this in the first place. The Fifth Estate broke the story about the $300K Mulroney received while still a sitting MP which led to cries from the media and Liberals that the settlement Mulroney received from the federal government over Airbus probably wouldn't have been offered if everyone had known about the $300 K in the first place. That's my take on it and frankly, I just want this issue to go away... it's boring politics and worse, I can't help but think that Schreiber is playing the Canadian taxpayer for suckers all to avoid extradition. I think an inquiry will tell us what we already know too: namely, Schreiber and Mulroney are shady people. Finally, I'd rather spend the millions of dollars this inquiry is going to waste on more important things, like dealing with homelessness or the health care system.
I'm almost with you on this score, Grumpy. It'll be like pissing money away on poll after poll, focus group after focus group on things like 'Do you want the death penalty back?' etc.
Or trying to buy Quebec votes during an election. Or just being the biggest spend-without-care government we've seen in decades. But from my partisan chair, I just like to see Harper sweat a little each time the media runs one of those shots of him and his bud' Mulroney in the newspaper...
Post a Comment