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Not surprisingly, Jody Wilson-Raybould’s two-page letter on Tuesday asking to remain part of the Liberal caucus proved unsuccessful. At 5:44 p.m. EST, she announced on Twitter that she had been turfed. Luckily, perhaps not accidentally, the letter works just as well as a giant middle finger aimed backwards.

“We committed to break old and cynical patterns of concentrating power in the hands of a few unelected staffers,” she wrote. “I believed we were going to uphold the highest standards that support the public interest, and not simply make choices to create partisan advantage.”

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At this point, surely, nobody who isn’t a partisan Liberal believes that has occurred.

Moreover, even if you believe this had nothing to do with Lavalin, the Liberals’ Bombing of Dresden-style damage control campaign incinerated any claim they still had to a new and enlightened politics. On Monday, Official Languages Minister Mélanie Joly sounded as if she had been literally possessed by Jean Chrétien: “I expect from team members that they act in a way as if they want to play a team sport.” And on Tuesday evening, in a toe-curling speech to his standing-ovation-happy caucus, Trudeau asked us to believe he finally decided Wilson-Raybould had to go because she recorded a conversation with the clerk of the privy council without his knowledge — even though the tape did nothing except confirm her testimony to the Justice Committee.