Breaking News: We have before us a political murder-suicide story, the likes of which we have never witnessed in Canada.
Paul Martin is murdering the Liberal government of which he is the boss, while at the same time killing his chances of becoming anything more than a footnote in Canadian history. He is now only weeks away from becoming another John Turner, a man who barely had time to run a series of downs before the final gun sounded.
While it may be impolite to put a person on trial before the victim has expired, this ain’t court. It’s a column.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the name of the accused is Paul Martin. We used to call him Paul Martin Junior, in the days when his dad, a generation ago, was a senior cabinet minister with elegance and eloquence. The accused is an apple that has fallen very far from the tree. At this moment, he cannot even see the tree without accessing nuclear-powered binoculars.
Permit yourself to think of his graceful, respected late father as Apple Tree and the accused as Rotten Apple.
Apple Tree surrounded himself by staffers who had great taste and dignity. They knew that the senior minister who always aspired to the highest standards of public service, demanded the same of the people closest to him.
But Rotten Apple had different preferences. For nearly a decade, he played on a team led by the linguistically rancid Jean Chretien. But nobody close to Chretien would ever make the mistake of calling Rotten Apple a team player. They were aware that Rotten was frequently using his worms to crawl into the computers and cellphones and, most recently, the Blackberries of key media soldiers.
For years the soldiers, on the assumption that some day Rotten would be king, accommodated his proclivities and fetishes. They were prepared to be treated like toadies in return for access to the secrets of power once Rotten replaced Rancid.
But who would have thunk that by the time the changing of the guard had taken place there would be so much sewer gas in the house called Liberal, that all Rotten could do was distance himself from Rancid? He invited one of the good old Gomers of the Quebec bench to run interference for him. Gomer hired a crony of former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s to prosecute the Chretien crowd.
Gomer was the dutiful gopher that Rotten wanted him to be. He tied a noose around Rancid and then being the dutiful gopher that he was born to be, delivered unto Rotten the Holy Grail of legal innocence—personal exoneration.
Having been personally exonerated, Rotten’s gang decided that they now had what they needed to scorch the immoral earth that their opponent Stephen Harper walked on. Of great assistance to the artificially enthusiastic Rotten was the contrast of an opponent, Harper, whose personality temperature was colder than that of the average cadaver. Rotten was preparing to smite Cadaver with a series of TV ads crafted to convey the impression to innocent citizens that if Cadaver ever ruled the dominion, Canada would morph into Alabama.
But Rotten’s Christmas of 2005 ended abruptly with a Boxing Day Bang when a certain headline became quickly seared into the minds of the innocents: RCMP criminal investigation.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: On Jan. 23, you are being asked to return a verdict of Rotten in the First Degree.
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