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For the Conservatives particularly, it has been the political equivalent of a war on two fronts. They have stumbled vainly about trying to keep the one from washing over the other, but press releases and campaign appearances rarely have the flair of outtakes from a hard day on the witness stand, and certainly not the sheer political magnetism of the prime minister’s former chief of staff showing up in the courtroom to unravel the obscure, crafty and otherwise esoteric manoeuvres of the PMO.

Opposition politicians obviously try to merge the public’s distaste for the Senate and the clamour over some of its members’ excesses with their well-exercised distaste for Conservative Leader Stephen Harper himself, seeing, or wishing to see, the Duffy trial as a surrogate for the election campaign itself.

And, to a point, this is fair. Harper, however disdainfully he has spoken of the Senate, has been fruitless in his quests to either repair, reduce its presence or bypass it. He picked and appointed some of his own to that turbulent college, and he’s paying a price for the calls to bring Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin into its gilded precincts.

Not that he alone should bear the intolerable weight of the opprobrium the Senate scandals have excited. There was a Senate before Harper and there will be one long after he leaves. And there were Senators before Harper who tested the high-grade elasticity of its “rules.” Some who found conducting its business from a Mexican beach more alluring than showing up in the chamber itself, or who borrowed its dubious prestige and siphoned its generous emoluments to swell their personal comfort while heartily neglecting what might reasonably be understood as their official duties. Thoughts, sober or second, they contributed but few.