Rex Murphy's take on the state of the Liberal Party

REX MURPHY (COMMENTATOR):

I don't know what else the federal Liberals could do to murkify their party's reputation. Sell the Peace Tower to Wal-Mart? Turn the House of Commons into a time-share Club Med, with the proceeds going to a pool for David Dingwall's severance package?

 But outside of those extremes, they've hit the bottom of the barrel, dug underneath the barrel, and found an even lower place where there are no self-respecting barrels at all. Once an independent commission has fired almost a full thousand pages talking about kickbacks, false receipts, fraud, rogue bureaucrats, and utter unaccountability, there's really not much left... unless there are plans to turn the Mint in to a private casino, to unshackle the Liberal Party from those paltry and antique notions of honour, integrity, and the public good.

Paul Martin is still standing, but only by virtue of Judge Gomery's assessment that during the period messrs. Guité, Corriveau, and Brault and all the other worthies were shovelling the public money from one pocket to another and creating more instant millionaires than lotto 6/49, Mr. Martin was merely the country's Finance Minister, the second most powerful man in the party and in the government, on his way to becoming the first.

 On Judge Gomery's understanding, Paul Martin was the lone saint in the brothel, the unoccupied first mate on an otherwise very busy pirate ship. It is a distinction of sorts but a distinction that doesn't really, when you think about it, have a lot to offer.

 His innocence, and I'm not questioning it in the slightest, about the goings-on in the Quebec wing of the Liberal Party during the years he was conducting an internal coup to take over the entire party has about it an almost miraculous obtuseness. For close to a decade, a stealth department operating out of the P.M.O. was hurling millions upon millions of dollars to the partisan machinery in Quebec, his home province; and the Finance Minister, Head of the Treasury Board, was a lone Mother Theresa keeping her head down in the bordello.

 By far the best dramatics yesterday were Jean Chrétien's. He's going to ask the courts to investigate Judge Gomery. Considering all the people Mr. Chrétien hasn't asked the courts to investigate, this is at least novel.

If Mr. Chrétien is angry at this point, maybe he should be angry at how his great plan to advertise Quebec back in to the confederation turned in to a slush fund for indolent advertising agencies, how the plundering of the unity fund has so ticked off Quebecers, both for its corruption and its stupidity, that they are now more ready for separation than at any other time since the referendum of 1995.

If Mr. Chrétien, who started the unity fund, wants to disown both its execution and its effects, then I guess it really wasn't very much to brag about in the first place. Actually, an apology from Mr. Chrétien for the mischiefs this harebrained and reckless scheme has caused, both to his party and to the country, would do a lot more for his reputation and legacy than all of his self-regarding histrionics with Judge Gomery.

I don't know what will bring down the Liberal Party.

If two years of ad scam, plundering the public purse, re-igniting separatism, confusing their party with our government, and wounding the very system of politics itself doesn't argue it's time for a change, it's time to question why we bother have elections in the first place. Ad scam was institutionalized theft via the party in power.

That's some platform for a fifth term.

 For "The National," I'm Rex Murphy.