Mr. Harper: If You Must Lie ...

Kindly do us the favour of at least remembering to tell a lie that can't be checked up on.

Unlike the logically inconsistent pablum you spewed in Peru yesterday.  As the good writers at the Hill Times point out, there's more holes in Harper's account of the Senate Expenses Scandal than a block of Swiss Cheese.

Mr. Harper went on: “Immediately upon learning that the source was indeed by chief of staff, Nigel Wright, I immediately asked that information be released publicly. That is what I knew.”

Mr. Fife, however, first asked Mr. Harper’s communications office on Tuesday, May 14, about information he had obtained indicating that Mr. Wright helped Sen. Duffy to repay the loan. That day, the day before Mr. Harper’s office confirmed the payment, Mr. Fife received the same response from Sen. Duffy’s office and the Prime Minister’s Office, both saying only that Sen. Duffy had “paid back the expenses and no taxpayers resources were used.” 

Mr. Harper’s communications director, Andrew MacDougall, did not reply to an email from The Hill Timeson Thursday noting, with a question mark, that Mr. Harper should have first learned about the payment on Tuesday, May 14, when Mr. Fife asked about it prior to his report.

Seriously?  You have to know that things have gotten out of control when Harper hasn't got a consistent story to tell.  Of course, logical inconsistency is the hallmark of lying when caught flat-footed.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government deploys a vast early-warning communications system to warn of potential problems on the horizon.

But Harper insisted Wednesday that he learned about his right-hand man bailing out an embattled Conservative senator in much the same way as other Canadians did: by seeing it on the news.

As the Canadian Press article cited earlier in this article points out, Harper spends enormous amounts of money on monitoring and picking out problems.  How the heck does something as big as Duffy's abuse of the Senate expenses system not make it onto that radar?  The answer is that given the Harper penchant for micromanagement and obsessiveness about "the message" that borders on paranoia, the issue had to have been visible.  The only reason it would have been invisible would be that Harper and his advisors have some rather enormous blind spots where an abuse is happening that just happens to be to their partisan advantage.