RETURN OF THE JEDI...

It's a legitimate question, but questions are a quibble apparently the Stephen Harper government does not deal well with.

But many are asking it - why delve into your own pandora's box and bring out an ol' dirty little scandal when it had disappeared behind a litany of fresh ones?

It's chess, people.

All that public cash the Harper government has been lavishing on private polls and focus-groupings may have told them something about their two most recent (as of June 6th) missteps, the NaFta-gate and Maxime's Own In-And-Out-And-Misplaced Emporium of duck-ups.

While the public was easily shielded away from the CONs' faux investigation result of the Brodie cock-up spreading stories about American politicians, the Maxime and the Biker Chick fracas has legs, so to speak.

While you better damn be sure you know what your father-in-law's up to, Liberal guy, but darn if its anyone's business who's cavorting with who behind CON closed doors. So that may explain why all those Oil Executives bring a bouquet to visit the PM...

Changing the channel is one thing, and this group of morally challenged buffoons have remotes for all occasions, but zigging back to your own malfeases seems a little counterproductive, doesn't it?

But this week Harper's chubby attack dog de jour, portly Jimmy Moore of Port Moody, is wheeled out with neon talking points dancing over his shoulder, to feign outrage and unleash accusations of uncertain proprieties. The tape's been fiddled with! Tampered at! Toggled too!

Yet when it becomes clear, that without some guilty party attached to it, and with no real interest in getting locked into a law suit with either the author/taper-in-question or the publisher, Moore had to resume his blathering by trying to pin this on the Liberals.

It's an attempt of fuzzicating the original accusation, which was that the CONs, led by Stephen so-called Harper, had approached dying independent MP Chuck Cadman in search of a deal to acquire his vote in 2005. Heck, even their own candidate and Cadman's widow remains adamant on that central point.

Obviously, this gang of bumbleheads has watched too many Law and Order episodes.

But that doesn't mean there isn't a method to their madness. First of all, as witnessed in the success of their favourite presidential bumbler GWB, creating stuff and throwing it at your opponent doesn't require authenticity, but stickability.

Secondly, noise is news. So if someone is shouting out about your attempt to bribe a dead man, shouting out 'when did you stop beating your wife?' can be a potential evasive trick.

Thirdly, with the economy heading down the toilet, and with an injunction that would keep the tape locked up in September on the books, this could be that additional pressure trying to prod Stephane Dion and the Liberals into bringing down the House.

While I'm all for an election -- wavering and disappearing during some of Harper's slippery tricks has not gone well with me nor a number of Liberals I admire -- I do agree that timing is critical. Harper believes a summer campaign, with Dion having less time to sell his (still unlaunched) carbon tax shifting idea, could be his best window. Ontario is only going to get uglier in the meantime and he needs to hold there and build in Quebec. Meanwhile, his toilet-paper thin talent pool of MPs continues to reflect poorly on his control-freakiness.

Squeezing the Liberals into feeling they have to use what had been a fairly neutralized tape (but because they would have made it a centralized point to their campaign had it been on the other foot, so that's why they fear it) when its available may be clever. But if I was advising the Liberals, I'd even toss out the tape now and just use Dona Cadman's quotes. And Maxime Bernier's stumbles, and... well, the list is growing, isn't it?