The stupid! It burns!

First, there's the stupid:

Is the Schreiber story changing?

CTV is now saying...

Meanwhile, recent court documents filed by Schreiber here in Canada alleged that he paid former prime minister Brian Mulroney $300,000 in cash payments shortly after Mulroney left office.

I thought the big bang in this sordid tale was that money allegedly changed hands before Mulroney left office.

Is Schreiber OR CTV now climbing down from that aspect of the story?

By George, Neo, you've teased it out since, as we all know, it's physically impossible for that $300,000 to have had anything to do with events that might have happened, you know, before Mulroney left office. You know ... perhaps like this (emphasis added):

Mr. Schreiber's affidavit, filed in Ontario Superior Court last week, claimed that he discussed an agreement worth $300,000 with Mr. Mulroney at the prime minister's summer residence at Harrington Lake before Mr. Mulroney left office in 1993.

No, I guess that 300 grand was clearly for services rendered by Mulroney after leaving office. Hey, I know ... let's let Lyin' Brian explain it for himself:

The following is a verbatim transcript of the sworn statement made by Brian Mulroney in the course of his lawsuit against the government of Canada.

Counsel: Did you maintain contact with Mr., er, Schreiber after you ceased to be prime minister?

Brian Mulroney: Well, from time to time, not very often, when he was going through Montreal, he would give me a call, we would have a cup of coffee, I think once or twice, and he told me that he continued to work on his projects, ah, that he was pushing the new government, and he told me that the idea of the project at that point was ______ , but the desirability at the time was to work with the provincial government of Quebec and the federal government, ah, the new federal government, to establish this new project in the east end of Montreal where the jobs were badly required and he told me that, um, he had hired Marc Lalonde to represent his interests before the new Liberal government.

Well, I'm convinced. Apparently, $300,000 is a perfectly reasonable price to charge for getting together for a cup of coffee or two from time to time. And to think I was so cynical about this.

I am a bad person.