You Tell 'em, @acoyne!

And if he really did not know?  Then the Duffy affair was born, not of any directive by the prime minister, but of a broader culture, in which paying hush money, tampering with audits and lying to the public were considered all part of a day's work.  Just so long as nobody is charged with a crime.

There are more than a few examples out there of backroom political people doing, you know, politics - manipulating people, data and money to get the results they want.  When caught in misdeeds, they deny, deflect or attack.

Even the ones who said there was a line they would not cross.

When it becomes solely about winning, everything else gets stripped away in the functionally-fixed race to victory.  What happens when you don't look where you're going?

There's no one political party at fault here, so let's not play that game; it's divisive, energy-consuming and time-wasting.  The problem is structural and cultural and the solution will only arrive when people recognize that we can only re-balance the system if we work together.

Which is antithetical to how our politics is working.

And that's just criminal.