They should take things back they said about that rat bastard because some judge set aside another judges' ruling because of ... "procedural fairness". I believe OJ was guilty too, I couldn't care less what the courts said!

Then you would agree that the Gomery report itself is vacuous and useless as a tool as it is all politics and nothing is really really except the fact-like things that I can convince myself are true. That is what you are suggesting, right?

Easy there, Alan.

There is an old adage that says authority can be delegated, responsibility cannot. The commander (in this case, the PM) can delegate his authority, but when they screw up, he is still, ultimately, responsible. This is, ideally, why senior leaders get cashiered when underlings go bad.

Chretien may not have personally committed a criminal act, but he was the man who appointed other men and women who did stupid (and sometimes illegal) things. This is, I believe, a standard you hold to the current PM, and it is no less valid when applied to previous occupants of the office.

So no, I won't be having a shinier impression of any politician just because they weren't personally doing bad deeds. Their first mistake was becoming a politician. Everything afterward is questionable.

There were plenty of other bad deeds he did while PM to make up for it. He'll get no apologies/retractions from me.

I see. So this is how it's going to be, eh?

My biggest beef with Chretien is that he imposed a heavy combat workload (the many Balkan missions) on the Canadian Forces, and then starved them of equipment and funding at the same time. I consider that to be well-nigh to treason, aiding armed forces against whom the Canadian Forces are engaged in hostilities.

Yet he is never going to go before any commission or court for that. Shuffling money around to corrupt admen and bagmen was, in my mind, one of the least offensive things members of that government did while in office.

Certainly a lot less harmful than asking men and women to put their lives on the line while you systematically take away the equipment and training that helps them do their job a little safer.

Well, I defer to your greater knowledge on that point but would ask whether that is something Chretien alone is responsible for?

My greatest beef with him would be participating in the stripping of Canada and Federal relevance but that has been an all party project since 1985.

I like Chretien.

I think Steyn got it right as to how AdScam would have gone, had Chretien still been in office:

<i>What would Chrétien have done? He'd have said, "Waal, da scam is da scam and, when you got da good scam, dat da scam. Me, I like da scam-and-eggs wid da home fries at da Auberge Grand-Mère every Sunday morning. And Aline, she always spray da pepper on it. Like Popeye say, I scam what I scam. Don' make me give you da ol' Shawiniscam handshake ..." Etc., etc., until it all dribbled away into a fog of artfully constructed incoherence, and the heads of the last two journalists following the story exploded, and he won his fourth term.</i>

As scandals go, it was a small one. What made me so angry at the time... I dunno. I was tired of the Liberals, I think, and I was especially tired of Paul Martin.

Jean would have gotten away with it.

<i>No italics?</i>

Ah, italics.

We are in an "em" rather than "i" world now, Ben.

"em" is semantic; "i" is presentational.

The world of law is to some degree parallel to the real world. I feel free to formulate my own opinions of right and wrong; guilt, innocence, and not-proven; worthy and unworthy; fair and unfair even though I haven't run my opinions past a court and a bunch of lawyers to see if that's ok. Wacky!

I trust you will save yourself from that hobbyist attitude if you ever need actual legal advice...or medical advice...or accounting advice. It's all fun and games to pretend when it doesn't matter but make sure you run your opinions past a court and a bunch of lawyers to see if that's ok if it's ever a matter of any consequence.

There is wacky and there is whacked.

I am an expert at dispensing legal and medical advice: see a lawyer and see a doctor (respectively).

Politics, I note, is not law; and furthermore there's the general hope that law is driven by some degree through our political system. A lot of lawyers seem to be oblivious to this.

That is the weirdest non-existent but apparently seen as pervasive complaint I have ever seen about law. Of course politics is law. It's not like you run for politics to get the chance to bake bread. Law is also politics if you have any sense of history.

Well now we have cleared up the question of envelopes full of money....Gormery said St. Jean was a bit tacky and now the envelopes don't matter. The folks sitting in prison no longer count.

Glad we got that cleared up...perhaps we should blame Paul Martin. Or George Bush.

Whatever, the actual people in charge are deeply innocent. No, really.

To quote a veteran member of the news desk I toil on, who sadly retired today, Jean Chretien was the best prime minister since Louis St. Laurent!

I agree 100%.

"And I don't want an extra carbon tax when the market is making that happen already through the speculator driven increase in energy prices?"

Coal and natural gas get taxed too, and need to be. Gasoline would not directly be taxed by the carbon tax, so the object is to reduce carbon emissions made by other CO2 sources.

The Green Shift carbon tax proposal is actually fairly minor as carbon taxes go. Gas is what, over $8/litre in Sweden, which introduce the first tax shift carbon tax in 1991, to great success. (You'd think the NDP would pay attention to that!)

Law accretes from politics. You're confusing earwax with being able to hear. (honey & bees would be a better analogy, but not so fun)