Incompetence and Hypocrisy in the Jean Appointment [Updated]

There's not much to say on the Governor-General appointment "scandal" at this point. Andrew Coyne, as usual, has an excellent post about why this matters. The Calgary Grit has detailed the evidence of Jean's soft spot for separatism. And it is clear that the PMO knew about this evidence.

What is interesting is that Martin seems to have cast a blind eye to this because he was smitten with Jean for being such a strong Quebecer. Why can't this guy get anything right?

What's also interesting is the hypocrisy of the PM arguing that Jean's links to separatism are fine as long as she isn't a separatist herself. As David Frum argues

So Paul Martin argued that it was intolerable to Canada to have an election when his poll numbers dipped after the sponsorship revelations because only "the separatists benefit from a premature election, and it is beyond belief to me why Stephen Harper wants to play that game."

Jack Layton and the NDP had campaigned in 2004 on a promise to "get tough on sleaze." Yet when the sleaze of the sponsorship scandal was exposed, Layton negotiated a deal to keep the sleazy in power. How did he justify that? In a speech in Halifax on April 28, he argued that as a Canadian patriot he had no choice: to vote against the government was to "get in bed" with the separatists.

And when the vote did finally loom, and the Martin government was saved by the surprise defection of Belinda Stronach, guess what reason she gave? Interviewed on Canada AM the morning after her switch, Stronach said: "I don't believe it's right to line up with the Bloc Quebecois, who have a separatist agenda, to bring down the government." Then, to drive the point home, she repeated her little talking point three times more.

When it was useful to them this spring, the Martinites applied loyalty tests with a zeal that would have done credit to Senator McCarthy himself. But the spring was such a long time ago. In those buried and bygone days, it was an affront and an offense to join with separatists to defeat a corrupt government. But it is a very different matter to appoint apparent separatists to sustain a corrupt government! That's OK! That's better than OK! That is (in the words of my friend John Duffy in this newspaper yesterday) "an appointment that has given the Canadian cause in Quebec its first good day in a year and a half."

Incompetence and hypocracy. It seems like such a vicous mischaracterization to frame Martin with, and then he goes around showing us how it's completely appropriate.

UPDATE

As Frum writes elsewhere,

As it is, the Jean appointment is turning into a classic Paul Martin botch-up. First comes the bold, visionary announcement: An agenda for the cities! Redressing the democratic deficit! Canada's first black Governor General! Then comes the cold shock of reality. The Martinites next try to bluff their way through by demanding that Canadians trust them (that's the stage we're at now). Then they're caught lying. Then they call their opponents nasty names, cut dirty deals, and violate constitutional rules all to escape the mess they themselves created by their own weird combination of vanity and fecklessness.