Dean Del Mastro: MP for Peterborough/Orange Sauce

How the mighty have fallen. If, by "mighty", we mean a guy who thought he was a Mastro of the Universe because he once was allowed to work himself into a regular thespian froth during parliamentary question period, reading angrily incoherent talking points scripted and handed to him by those clever partisan children who work in the Prime Minister's office.

Then, last year, Dean Del Mastro was launched heavily, nay, gracelessly into the news for something that looked a lot like hanky-panky with his election financing. (Standard disclaimer: not proven in a court of law, still under investigation, blah blah, blah.) The welcome upshot was, suddenly, lo, not a peep from the Mastro anymore.

As in all cases where a Harpo Tory has been observed with a webbed mitt not unadjacent to some cookie jar or other, everybody but the Mastro was out there skatin' into the corner with elbows, shoulders, knees, (and likely Don Cherry's mouth) flappin', while Dean was roped and gagged, schtum, down to the bench by imperial fiat. Or something much like it.

For practical purposes, this named him as a bad boy in all but name. If only the cut-from-a-very-similar-dark-blue-polyester Pierre Poilievre could, finally, be similarly gagged, it might be a personal coyote dream come true. I digress. Not sorry ay-tall!

Anyway, yesterday the old Mastro apparently decided he'd spent enough time banished to Coventry (look it up), and made his comeback move by trying to smear a Postmedia reporter who's been watching all sortsa election improprieties rather closely.

Then, maybe because old habits die hard when there's muddy backsplatter, he denied he'd ever done it and blamed it on the PM's office. After which, possibly due to a stern talking-to by someone who might be even more twitchy about deniability than himself, he issued a lame-o retraction in which he sorta took responsibility but still sorta denied a personal hand in the sorry episode, instead sorta trying to pin the actual wording back onto the PMO, much like a paper tail on a birthday-party ass donkey.

Yes, it's complicated. But the dumb-coyote short version is that Dean Del Mastro seems to waddle and quack a lot more like some unhappy variety of duck every time he tries to splorp back out of that suckin' black ooze at the bottom of Little Lake. . .