Watching the Prime Minister's chief of staff under fire for allegedly exposing Democratic hopeful Barack Obama's two-faced campaign against the free trade agreement, one thought kept going through my head.

What a moron.

No, no — not Ian Brodie, the brilliant sidekick of Prime Minister Stephen Harper who is now under all-party assault in the House of Commons as the suspected source of a leak with the potential to damage U.S. relations.

No, it was an echo from the last PMO aide who attracted the attention of American presidential politics, specifically the spokesman for former prime minister Jean Chrétien who, in 2002, was overheard saying "what a moron" to describe President George W. Bush.

Francie Ducros may have been prescient, as it turns out, but that one casual phrase had Opposition leaders, including Stephen Harper, demanding her scalp as the price for triggering an international incident. "We witnessed the insult that was heard around the world," Mr. Harper yelped at the time.

The trouble is that, except for her dismissal, it's eerily similar to the Ian Brodie scenario.

And you could argue Mr. Brodie's alleged observation that Senator Obama's opposition to elements of NAFTA was primary positioning and unlikely to become presidential policy, is actually much, much more dangerous than the Ducros backlash.

Just how seriously the Prime Minister is taking a leak credited (or blamed) for tilting Democrat opinion against Senator Obama in the Ohio primary this week was reflected in his abrupt change in tone Thursday. His emphatic denial of Mr. Brodie's culpability in the mess Wednesday was watered down yesterday to a stone-faced shrug and promise to follow all the recommendations of a leak-plugging investigation inside his bureaucracy.

So flailingly desperate was Mr. Harper for a decent response that he actually chided the Liberals for not raising a ruckus against his government on the NAFTA scandal earlier.

At least Liberal leader Stéphane Dion had enough spontaneous smarts to retort he would have gone on the attack earlier, but it was hard to pick among so many scandals. Gosh. Does Mr. Harper think it's easy to make priorities?

The media machinations of this are interesting, even if a tad inside baseball. Mr. Brodie allegedly shared his insight with CTV journalists during a long and boring budget lockup, who dutifully reported the drift of the conversation while protecting their source.

But somehow Mr. Brodie's identity was picked up by the ABC television network. And after a CTV reporter confided that Mr. Brodie was the source of his leak to a journalism class, it was only a matter of time before his identify reached the ears of intrepid CBC reporter Susan Bonner for her newscast-topping story.

Thus we have the scenario of a CTV source being outed on an American and a rival Canadian network. My head hurts.

It may just be a misread of his body and language, but Mr. Harper seemed severely vexed at the ugly possibility of having the original source of the leak working just a few steps from his office.