If you're cruising the Canadian blogs looking for reactions on the big story of the weekend, you can cruise on over to Bound by Gravity where Andrew has had* a post with links to comments from a wide variety of bloggers. All I have to add is this:
What people are reacting to is hearsay and anonymous second-hand reporting on testimony from someone who's facing criminal charges and apparently decided to sing like a bird. He may have told the truth and he may have tried to spread the blame as widely as possible. I'm inclined to reserve judgement until things settle down and we get some decent, sourced reporting on what's going on.
That should in no way be taken as a defence of the Liberals. When the sponsorship story first broke I made a strong statement in favour of a public inquiry and despite Gomery's occasional missteps, my opinion hasn't changed. We need to get to the bottom of what happened and if the corruption in the governing party goes as deep as it appears to it wouldn't surprise me too much.
But I've also seen how the grapevine can work. Everyone loves a nice, juicy scandal and when a story like this spreads by word of mouth, details have a tendency to get either overlooked or embellished depending on who's doing the talking.
Update:
* Andrew had second thoughts and that post is no longer available. As of this writing the feds are exploring ways to plug the leaks and considering whether or not to charge bloggers who have linked to reports on the testimony in question with contempt of court. I actually doubt it will come to that.
I agree. After failing to have a caveat on my original post telling people how to find the Brault info I updated late last night. It's worth reading, but it's certainly not to be treated as the absolute truth.
Quite the feeding frenzy, eh? I've seen a lot of posts concerning the publication ban itself. People seem to think it's censorship. Given how poorly this one is working, perhaps next time someone with both incriminating and self-incriminating evidence is needed to be heard from, they will refuse to answer questions citing their Charter right to not self-incriminate.
And then they'll no more feeding frenzies, and no testimony to move forward on.