Toronto - the city where stupid leftists' self-esteem is tied to municipal politics

Does your sense of self-esteem fluctuate depending on whom is your municipal councilor or mayor?

Do you feel better or worse about yourself and your ability to hold your head high depending on whether you have a socialist or a conservative being called "Your Honor" at City Hall?

If the answer is no, then you're obviously not a "progressive" Torontonian.

It's a fascinating phenomenon that only affects one type of political class  I've heard it in conversations, seen it on facebook postings and the National Post's Chris Selley noted in a tweet that the Toronto Star's dunce columnist Christopher Hume is feeling personally humiliated because Rob Ford is the mayor of Toronto.

When the pompous, inept David Miller ruled Toronto for two previous terms and imposed a preposterous agenda while sending taxes skyrocketing, I don't remember a single conservative whining about how they were personally embarrassed. Have I missed something where socialist websites have been offering a discount on those online genealogy packages and a bunch of them have discovered they are related to Rob Ford though their bloodlines?

When David Miller utterly capitulated to civic employees unions after leaving the city with six weeks worth of stinking garbage piled high in the height of the summer, was anyone on the right ashamed to be a Torontonian because of him?  Again, a resounding nyet.

To understand this, one has to know a little about the "progressive" mindset. They are hopelessly insecure and see their entire value as human beings being based on what others think of them. By that extension, being in a city where a boisterous fiscal conservative won the last civic election by an enormous margin over all his rivals must come as a painful personal blow. It must be so shameful for them to have to explain that to their enlightened friends who live in places like Vancouver.

They must hang their heads low when they travel and go to diner parties with friends from other locales.  Sitting at tables with flowing chardonnay and Joan Baez' singing playing on the sound system to remind them of their youth, while their comrades can talk about how much progress they have made, the Toronto progressive must have to cower in shame. It must be incomprehensible for such a gathering to grasp how a modern Canadian city chose to be governed by someone who believes government shouldn't spend more than it can afford.

Clearly this sort of personal affront must have been caused by the progressives not being progressive enough. If only they had raised taxes even further, incurred more civic debt while doling out public funds to  any grievance-monger capable of filling out a form and found new laws to restrict personal liberties, more people would see things their way.

Oh, the sorrow and humiliation. And the worst part is, when they create a performance art interpretive dance piece to express their dismay, it might be a little harder to get that tax-funded arts grant so that a total of 14 people in an audience can experience their plight.

"Ford must go," declares Christopher Hume. bit.ly/TbBMje Replaces former slogan, "Ford won't win." thestar.com/news/gta/toron…
— Chris Selley (@cselley) November 19, 2012

"Thank goodness the United States exist to give proper Canadian comedians an opportunity not to suck"

It’s not very good at all. It’s certainly not politically correct.  But I have to agree with some of the commenters cited in a follow-up CBC article noting the fevered online reaction to the original piece: The skit sounds like nothing so much as a terrible CBC comedy program. Maybe funnier.  

CBC-approved comedian Shaun Majumder disagrees. “When you are in the workplace — and especially if it is the military — it’s like you’ve got to have some kind of sensitivity to the current world that we live in,” he told the network.   

Right, right. In the workplace. Your local bank branch, for example, or florist or fishmonger, or … military base full of people relatively near the front lines of a war against, broadly speaking, Osama bin Laden and his followers. It’s totally the same thing!

Chris Selley in the National Post sums up why the CBC and it's lame-ass alleged comedians like Shaun Majumder should stop pretending they produce competent news or comedy programming.

An interesting discussion about the municipal election

The National Post's weekly political panel discussion was very interesting this week.

They discussed changing Toronto's first past the-post-system to a one that ranks choices when to achieve a winner with a majority of support.

But when given thought, this proposal ends up being less-than-fully democratic its mathematical implications and a person with a majority of second choice votes could actually win over someone who had more first choice votes. The only honest way of implementing that type of idea would be to have separate, run-off elections in which candidates were gradually eliminated until one achieves a clear majority.

But on the subject of support and opposition towards front running mayoral candidate Rob Ford, two of the panelists, Anthony Furey and Chris Selley, showed some genuine insight into what is helping to mobilize Ford's support and why his opponents' tactics haven't been able to turn it away:

FUREY: It’s not the content of the anti-Ford articles that ends up working to Ford’s benefit, it’s the attitude. It’s the suggestion that Ford voters are too stupid for their own good and fail to understand how voting for Ford goes contrary to their own interests. Now THAT is anti-democratic. It presupposes what people want out of government based on their salary level, the colour of their skin or something other non-determinate variable. Ford supporters may be completely aware of what will happen should he become mayor and they are voting for him specifically for those results. Few anti-Ford pundits have been able to toss off their self-righteousness long enough to understand this.

SELLEY: Don’t think I can put it much better than that. You read some opinion columns and you’d think Toronto will be nothing but a smoking crater at the end of four years of Rob Ford. (In fact there’s only a small chance Toronto will be a smoking crater in 2014.) People who think that the city is already horribly broken in any number of ways are unlikely to respond well to that. They sense, I think, an implicit message that the status quo is OK. It really isn’t, and that’s what attracted them to Ford in the first place.

Furey and Selley make very good points. It's illustrated in the attitude of people like Councilor Joe Mihevc, a local politician whose comments suggest that Ford's supporters are too stupid to understand the implications of their choice, to say nothing of the histrionics in the media from columnists like Christopher Hume and Heather Mallick, which does a lot more to help elect Ford than defeat him.

Read the full piece here in The National Post