Chretien/Martin/Manley

Now, for a few quick points on the other Liberal stories in the news:

- I don't see a big problem with Manley being on the Afghanistan panel. If he rejected, then I'm sure Harper would have found a way to spin it to be like us Liberals are too self-centered to possibly come up with any solutions, and he would still have pressed forward with it anyways. Dion did fairly well again on this question in trying say something along the lines of, "Thank God we have a reasonable voice there, since the rest of the panel is full of Mulroney people." Great move by Harper by doing this, since he might be able to avoid the Afghanistan question in an election campaign, but we'll just have to work around this and show how he doesn't actually care.

- As for the Martin-Chretien dispute, what did people expect? Chretien's not going to back down from taking stabs at Martin. And while Warren may still be angry at the current people for defending Martin over Gomery, politically it's the only thing to do. As incredibly stupid and boneheaded as Martin actually was with the inquiry, once it's announced, we can't have people saying, "We shouldn't have launched it," especially Dion. It was a stupid move, but by denouncing it, we would be bringing up all the old corruption issues back to the forefront, which really doesn't help our poll numbers. Otherwise, all that Chretien's book seems to be getting out is that Martin was incompetent as PM, which I think most people already realize. And as much as talking about these disputes of the past sucks for us, I think it's better than media focusing on the "disputes" of the present group, which we can't so easily dismiss.