While some of my colleagues like Glen McGregor -- who, along with Parliament Hill freelancer Tim Naumetz, first reported on what we now know as the in-and-out scheme -- dug into the details of the nearly 700 pages of documentation that the Elections Commissioner put in front of a judge last week in order to obtain a search warrant, Elizabeth Thompson, a few desks over from mine, remembered what Tom Flanagan had said about the concept of moving money in from the national campaign to the local campaign and then back out again from the local campaign to the national campaign.

The same quote jumped out at me when I read Flanagan's book last fall.

I blogged a fair bit about Flanagan's book, Harper's Team: Behind the Scenes in the Conservative Rise to Power. If you're covering federal politics I would suggest it's a much more important read than, say, Mulroney's Memoirs or Eddie Goldenberg's How It Works (enjoyable and illuminating as those books were). Flanagan lays out a lot of the core strategy behind some recent and likely future Conservative moves. (And many Conservatives are not exactly grateful to Flanagan for that, I might add.)

And, keeping in mind that one of the defences mounted by Conservative MPs in the House of Commons in the wake of the RCMP raids was that it just wasn't fair, that every party engages in the advertising financing schemes that they did. "The unequal treatment is not justified," said Government House Leader Peter Van Loan. Really? Well, Mr. Van Loan, meet Mr. Flanagan:

"People expect conservatives to be tough. They believe in the values of self-help, individual responsibility, criminal justice, economic realism, and national interest. They look ridiculous, if they go around snivelling and complaining about fairness every time an opponent takes a shot at them. Political campaigning is a civilized form of civil war. The point is to win the war, not to complain that people are fighting. Leave the whining to the utopians who fantasize about conflict-free societies."

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