He actually believes it: Joe Volpe isn't fooling anyone -- except, apparently, himself

Many indictments may be laid at the feet of Joe Volpe, but the most severe I can think of is this: I think he means it. I accuse him of sincerity. I accuse him of believing his own humbug: that all those children of all those Apotex executives each individually decided to donate the maximum $5,400 to his campaign of their own free will and out of their own bank accounts, because they were excited about his "message"; that the dead people his Quebec campaign signed up as members are the kind of "anomalies" one should expect in the "hurly-burly" of politics; that he is the victim of an anti-Italian smear campaign on the part of unnamed members of the party "establishment," but that he will fight on because, after all, it's for the kids. It would be one thing if Mr. Volpe mouthed these absurdities in a cynical, calculating attempt to divert attention from his campaign's multiple misdeeds. That at least would be recognizably human behaviour, the kind of thing you expect from your average grifter: Caught in the act, deny. Caught again, deny again. But in fact it's much worse than that. We haven't seen this sort of self-delusion since Sheila Copps's encounter with the woman at the bank machine. You remember: The reason she finally agreed to abide by her campaign promise to resign her seat if the GST was not abolished was that she found herself unable to look the woman behind her in the eye -- a fabrication of quite mind-warping dimensions, inasmuch as it was supposed to illustrate how deep-down honest she was: how troubled she was at having broken her promise to resign. But the promise, as her subsequent behaviour made clear, was never intended to be kept. It was itself a lie, told to make people believe the original, ur-lie, namely that the Liberals would abolish the GST. Only Ms. Copps had been in the game so long she was genuinely unable to see this. The moral she drew from the whole experience? "I don't think I'll ever be putting my seat on the line again if the voters are generous enough to reinvest their confidence in me." Spend a couple of hours plumbing the depths of that one. But this is what politics does to you, or leastways to those not already possessed of a talent to deceive, for whom the attraction of politics is precisely the opportunities it affords to exploit their gift. We are not, as a rule, supposed to say this. Most people in politics are decent, honest people, we are told time and again: Only populist yobs and voters would think otherwise. So when we are confronted with evidence to the contrary, a Dalton McGuinty here, a Glen Clark there, a Brian Mulroney or a Jean Chretien or a Paul Martin in between, these are to be taken as, well, anomalies. Only they aren't the exception, they're the rule. The outright, bold-faced, directly-contradicted-by-the-facts nose-stretcher is distinguished only by its clumsiness: a lie so obvious that even a politician can't get away with it. But in fact most politicians dissemble, in large ways or small, most of the time. Virtually every line they utter from morning to night contains at least some degree of falsehood. Only we, like they, are so inured to it that we no longer notice it. Or else we roll our eyes and say, "that's politics." To take a small example, more or less at random: The first question the Liberals asked in the first Question Period after Parliament resumed demanded to know whether the government, in light of the shootings at Dawson College, would now abandon its plan to abolish the gun registry. Was this question asked in the spirit of genuine inquiry? Of course not. Not only had the gun registry failed to stop the shooting, there is no way it could have: The guns were legally registered. It was asked for two reasons: because they could not ask about Afghanistan, the party's divisions presenting too inviting a target for government counter-attacks, and because the gun registry is popular in Quebec, where the Conservatives are vulnerable. So the murder of a young girl, and the wounds suffered by more than a dozen others, were used as props to move the numbers in Quebec. All in a day's work: another little tableau of feigned outrage, to add to the others. Ask those involved about it, and they would stoutly deny that was their business. But then they would deny it to themselves. They have to. You could not possibly spend every day of your life insisting that everything your party has ever done or ever will do is perfect in every way, while everything your opponents do is vile beyond words, without going a little mad. Or rather, you could not do so without convincing yourself you believed it.