Featured Post

How To Deal With Gaza After Hamas

Thursday, May 8, 2014

Maclean's new article on Rob Ford



"However steep the odds against him, Ford’s past resilience makes him a marvel — the political equivalent of an inflatable punching toy. The last missing segment in Ford’s tragi-comic arc is redemption.

Either the rise and fall of Rob Ford has reached its final traumatic chapter, or there’s a whole new volume to be written..."

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I dunno, at this point the floodgates are open, and nothing's going to lose them.

And I somehow doubt that with each new story, people are saying "Yeah, i didn't like him before, but NOW he's my guy."

I had an interesting conversation with a very anti-Ford, professional, downtown-elite friend on Friday night, just after the "bang my wife, Bruno" story popped online. He was of a mind that the continuing stories were distasteful and part of a campaign against His Worship.

I was thrilled by that statement, if only because I love teaching recent history so.

Our press (and, yes, even the Star is much more restrained than that of our American or British cousins. And there was no shortage of rumours about the mayor's extracurricular activities, but no pretext for running them.

And then came the Garrison Ball, where Ford, officially representing the city, showed up fucked up on something. That, combined with the concerns of his own staff, was enough to run the story.

The Fords, being the Fords, dug their own grave by calling the Star professional liars and demanding that they sue him for saying so. That, as it turned out, was very, very stupid.

Essentially, Rob Ford turned himself into Gary Hart, challenging the press to get him, when he must have known that they could. Hart didn't have his own precedent to guide him, but Ford did, making him either unimaginably arrogant or unspeakably ignorant. Of course, I don't mean to overlook the possibility that he's both.

Finally, I asked my friend if the media was supposed overlook the chief magistrate using hard drugs with a criminal organization known for gun-running and having picture taken with a thug that was shot in the head less than a month later.

Needless to say, it was a pretty short argument, which impressed me because my friend is a lawyer and is paid a LOT of money to argue.

Of course, the Friends of Ford continue to try to rebut these facts by saying, "But George Smitherman.." which ignores a few things.

1) Smitherman's adventures were at least a decade in the past, well before he held elective office.

2) Smitherman admitted them himself before he could be confronted about, which I discussed with adorable metaphors here http://enjoyeverysandwich.blogspot.ca/2006/05/from-ministry-of-sodomy-and-speed-in.html

3) In doing so, Smitherman avoided the kamikaze mission of challenging the media to prove his untoward behaviour, since it couldn't hurt him further.

In the last couple of weeks, I've heard no shortage of lunatic comparisons between Ford and Marion Barry, which don't apply because;

A) It took Barry more than six months to recover, mostly because he went to prison first.

B) Ignorant white trash are a much smaller proportion of the Toronto electorate than angry black folk are in DC.

C) Bitch actually DID set him up! That time-stamped FBI camera didn't wind up in the whore's hotel room by accident. I suspect that resonated with Barry's voters in a way that Ford's can't, with his "law and order" base.

The Macleans article was a fun read, but even they pointed out what a organizational mess the campaign is, and just how egomaniacal and ineffective Doug is.