"Cry Me a River"

'Lyin' Brian' is on stage, again, defending his 'honour' from the swine with whom he once laid down. The 'guy from Baie Comeau', although he might have had some deep concerns about the financial equity of his family as he stepped from the political stage into a sinecure that would have delighted most other guys from Baie Comeau, is trying to explain the 'honest' reasoning that led him to accept packets of cash from a German arms pedlar. It must have been the thought of baby Alexander, a mere decade along his path and facing the possible prospect of never owning his own new Porsche, that made 'Daddums' suck on a molar and take that filthy lucre.

Not only was that distasteful, but the solon of our time had the perspecacity to sock it away in a safety deposit box lest he have to consider it as 'income',and report it for tax purposes. It's never income until you're going to spend it (r-i-i-ight) and RevCan allows a window while some favored folk can make up their mind. He tells us he eventually did come clean, when the first attempted besmirching wised him to a possible comeuppance. Of course, being as since nobody asked him about packets of money, he never thought to mention them, even though he went right out afterward and turned them into taxable income.

For somebody as wise as them lawyer guys, Mulroney speaketh the shits. And not particularly well.

But failing the bullshit there are always Irish tears. Not any sincere kind, the ones that generally appear at the bottom of a grog bottle, or when the heartstrings are plucked by maudlin sentimentality, or when you're caught with a naughty bit in the babysitter. And so the thought of overfed newsies sniggering while the 'Leader' spoke of the devastation faced by little Alexander having his Daddy called a crook, moved the great one to shed a tear - a sniffle, a stifled sob, a subdued 'merci' before he had to bawl out loud. As Pat Corrigan's cartoon in the Star, below, depicts.



This particular scene of the comedy may once again play out in the favour of Mr.Mulroney, but taken as a whole this particular farce is actually a tragedy. Not for Mulroney, according to himself - for once again he sees 'vindication' in a failure to convict. In that heart of hearts, however, the one he might once have had of a confessional Saturday and the one he's going to need again in the none too distant future, he knows human law to be the ass it was once described to be. There is another - and there may be tears then, too, only too late.