Quote:

“OTTAWA – A Conservative backbencher is suggesting Elections Canada may be to blame for the robocalls affair.

“I suspect that at the end of the day, if Elections Canada has the resources to do a proper investigation, they’ll find they’re themselves significantly responsible,” Saskatchewan MP Maurice Vellacott said in a statement.”

Oh my Lord God – you can set your watch by this one! They’ve blamed Liberals, rogue staffers, the media, and even denied it happened at all.

It’s 2004 all over again!

“Prime Minister Paul Martin says a small, “sophisticated” group of civil servants was behind the corruption scandal in the federal sponsorship program.

Martin rejected calls to name those 14 or so bureaucrats believed responsible for the scandal, saying the public inquiry he has called will uncover all information on the matter.”

It’s like Putin’s weekend “win,” too, except that one at least had election observers! Anyway, I love this thing. For progressives, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.

(The Robocon Cons won’t love my column tomorrow, however.)

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Here.

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We didn’t do it. The Liberals did it. It happened, but it’s exaggerated. It was a rogue staffer. It can’t be us, because it happened in Calgary. It’s taken nine months, so it has to be made-up. Elections Canada is biased against us. We didn’t need to do it, we were going to win. It’s all hysteria. It’s all media bias.

And so on and so on.

Those are just a few of the excuses that Conservatives – looking worried, sounding frenzied – have offered up in the growing electoral fraud scandal. There are more.

I need your help: I want to do a round-up in the Sun on Tuesday about the various Con excuses in Robocon – and, if possible, what noteworthies are making them.

Fill comments with your picks – and thank you!

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When confronted by crisis and scandal, the Conservative government has a standard operating procedure.

Code Yellow: Claim average people don’t care, and say it’s time to move on to more important subjects, like the economy.

Code Orange: If that doesn’t work, toss a young Tory staffer under the proverbial bus, and say the matter’s closed.

Code Red:Blame the media, blame bureaucrats, and screech about Adscam, coalitions, the NEP and the perils of socialism. Rinse and repeat.

An important part of this process, usually, is to cite the words of commentators who defend the Harper regime. So, as the RoboCon scandal continues to spread, we can expect to see Conservative MPs getting up on their hind legs in the Commons, and quoting scrupulously neutral oracles like L. Ian MacDonald, who this week declared that “Harper won the election fair and square,” and that fraudulent phone calls about the location of polling stations wouldn’t have changed the outcome.

The problem, however, is that it increasingly looks like the Harper Cons didn’t win the election “fair and square.” It looks like they cheated. And, moreover, in ridings where Liberals were defeated by small margins — such as Nipissing-Timiskaming (18 votes) or Etobicoke Centre (26 votes) — the outcome could have been quite different, indeed.

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Assorted Reformatories have swarmed this and other web sites, winged monkey-like, to contest the 31,000 complaints of electoral fraud figure, below.

Whatever. Knock yourselves out, monkeys. Halve that number, and halve it again and again.

The sponsorship affair resulted in six prosecutions (none of which involved an elected Liberal, by the by). But those six prosecutions were more than enough to help wreck the Liberal brand for a decade and counting.

So, have at it, winged monkeys. It could be 31,000 cases, or it could be 31. Any way you slice it, your team is well and truly fucked.

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Shorter version: Harper says he didn’t need foreign help to hijack the election. Except, um, he did.

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Nice.  Thanks!

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Holy crap!

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“Daniel LeBlanc is trying to reach you.”

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