Heather Mallick's public descent into madness continues

Jonathan Kay on Mallick's Toronto Star column today: "one of the most bizarre and incomprehensible oped columns ever published by a Canadian broadsheet newspaper"

...It’s not snobbery, like the appalling Prince Charles and the dreadful Camilla calling themselves “Fred and Gladys” as a private joke during their affair, as though there is something disgusting about couples called Fred and Gladys, which there might well be. I have not met them.

It’s just that despite the fact that Kate and William are not snobs, the royal baby will not be called “Greg Thompson.”

But there is no reason on earth why the kinglet should not be called “Greg Thompson” and why thousands of people in years to come should not name their babies “Greg Thompson” in an effort to capture some of the royal fairy dust. “Greg Thompson” is a perfectly pleasant name and its owners are doubtless good people whom I would be pleased to know. 

I have no interest in the royal nonsense. I like Kate and William because I am toned to like Diana’s offspring, poor things — I did love that woman — but it’s not a generational interest because I am not a snob. I’m interested in who your parents were only because they were the people responsible for you being so messed up, a subject of fascination.

This still doesn't top her infamous "Hate f*ck with Rob Ford" column

The Toronto Star's Heather Mallick makes stupidity a new form of public spectacle

Of course if Mallick were a journalist, she might have found out that the terrorists planned to derail a Via train on the trestle as it was crossing the border between Canada and the States. A train full of passengers falling into the Niagara River would be quite spectacular, even if aimed against a pitiful old Via train. 

As for al Qaeda and Iran, yes, they do consider each other heretics. Yes, they'll likely get around to killing each other some day, but like anyone, they have priorities. First, they'd like to kill or enslave the infidels, starting with Americans, Westerners in general, and Jews. And while they're busy with that fairly tall order, they're willing to sometimes work together.

Indeed, The Western intelligence community has long known that al Qaeda has a branch in Iran. It's not a secret. With a few minutes' research. Mallick could have learned that Iran tolerates al Qaeda's presence. Has for more than a decade.


Brian's Blog, quoted above, is off by a bit - it should have only taken Mallick a few seconds to find details of the al Qaida/Iran link. But Torontonians who familiar with her know Mallick's crazy ravings aren't really journalism - she's the Toronto Star's contribution to the field of comedy.

Toronto's elites create a new Easter martyr

In this week following Easter, it is apt to think of a man who has strived to helped his fellow man,  giving his days and nights to talk to the common people. This man, himself in the center of a maelstrom of controversy, is continually beset by those asking him to alleviate their problems, and quietly, without fanfare he has helped many of his fellows. Yet for his efforts, a jealous elite are threatened by this man's appeal to the common people in whose interests the ruling classes pretend to act, while only truly serving themselves.

Yet relentless in their slander and vilification of this servant of the people, the powerful not only fail to diminish him, but have created the image of a martyr standing bravely against the ferocious onslaught.

This martyr is Toronto's mayor, Rob Ford.

In the Editorial boardroom at the Toronto Star, the continual frustration at their inability to make a dent in Rob Ford's support must be competing with embarrassment that the highest elected municipal official in their cosmopolitan city is, in their eyes, a brash, overweight bumpkin. The pile-on is abetted by histrionic invective from the socialist weekly NOW magazine and disgruntled columnists like The Globe and Mail's Marcus Gee. Despite their best efforts, and unrelenting attacks that have gone on virtually daily since the former Etobicoke councillor declared his mayoral candidacy, they have done nothing to diminish his popularity with his core constituency.

They have portrayed Ford as racist and anti-immigrant, but in his home riding, made up mainly of immigrants and minority voters, he regularly polls overwhelming majorities, exceeding 75% of the vote.

What the Star's satraps have blinded themselves to is that rather than tear Ford down, their histrionic mudslinging is actually bolstering Ford's popularity.

At this point, one wonders what the anti-Ford media is up to? To whom are they trying to make their sale? The people who hate Ford don't need daily reminders. They will hate him no matter what. But these histrionic attacks only invigorate Ford's supporters.

Making a typically hyperbolic comparison to Marion Barry, the felonious former mayor of Washington D.C., even the Star's editor Bob Hepburn conceded that their scandal-mongering against Ford is unlikely to have any affect.

But like spoiled infants throwing a tantrum. they are just unable to restrain themselves.

We hates the Ford, my Precious!

Rick Salutin, the old dinosaur of the left The Star acquired after he was unceremoniously dumped by the Globe and Mail, has made himself look like a malicious clown railing against Ford. Salutin, whose appearance is daily becoming more like The Lord of the Ring's Gollum,  before calling the mayor a "drama queen" said the Ford era has "been so much about him, it's hard to remember there's a whole city involved."

Actually, it's Salutin, his colleagues, and employers who are the drama queens who have forgotten the city. They have incessantly been trying to make Ford an issue at the expense of Toronto\s best interests and with complete disregard for journalistic integrity.

What are the issues the Star has been so worked up about? That Ford may have been drinking? That he solicited charitable donations on City letterhead he paid for from his own pocket and from which he derives absolutely no personal fiduciary gain? That he might have smoked a joint when he was on vacation in Florida?  None of the accusations, even if they are true, suggest that Ford has ever done anything improper for enriching himself.

Ford has devoted himself, while facing ridicule and scorn, to doing what is right for Toronto's taxpayers. He has fought hard to keep taxes and costs down for Torontonians, and he has been as successful as anyone could be given the magnitude of the opposition he's faced.

Today, when Ford was the voice fighting back against proposals to raise taxes, which had skyrocketed under his predecessor, David Miller, The Star published a spiteful article focusing on the way the mayor expressed disdain at imposing taxes on Torontonians while neglecting the detrimental affect of the new levies.

When Ford said there is corruption at City Hall, the Star was more interested in trying to vilify the mayor than serve public interests by exposing the corruption.

Something the media elites in Toronto don't realize is that people aren't as stupid as they think they are; nor will they believe everything they are told, just because it comes out of the mainstream news.

There isn't a major city in the world without some level of corruption at the municipal level.  And people know it.

In Toronto, billions are being spent on condo and commercial developments, often over the objection of local residents. A lot of money is being thrown around amid interests that are tied to that development and it may not be coincidental that more than one downtown "left-wing" councilor is living awfully well for someone supposedly making $102,608 per annum.

Ford has said he is willing to act for the will of residents when it comes to development. But rather than pursue potential corruption where it actually may exist, The Star, which makes a tremendous amount of money carrying advertisements for condos, is more interested in pursuing Rob Ford for potential technical errors in his efforts to help underprivileged kids with his school football foundation.

Just because Torontonians have ignored the will of the media elites doesn't mean they are stupid, or nuts as Star columnist Heather Mallick shrieked around the time she wrote a bizarre, disturbed, imagined wretched sexual tryst with Ford. Nor are they "hordes" conjuring up the images of barbarity attempted by the Star's resident condominium aficionado, Christopher Hume.

People aren't as stupid as Toronto's media elites would like. Voters not obsessed with their own insecurity are not afraid to have opinions that aren't sanctioned at One Yonge Street by the Toronto Star.

Ford was elected by a city fed up with social engineers and special interests who wanted to impose their vision at other people's expense, while telling the public they knew what is best.

What Rob Ford represents is the common person saying "we don't need a pompous, self-interested political class to tell us they know more about what's best for us than we do ourselves."

And as much as a sanctimonious political and media elite may hate it,  what they are telling us to think isn't turning people against Ford as much as turning him into a hero.

Other media accounts make it appear The Toronto Star is lying about Rob Ford (again)

An investigation by the Globe and Mail flatly contradicts the Toronto Star's accounts of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's allegedly intoxicated behavior last month at The Garrison Ball charity dinner.

According to the Globe:

The Globe spoke to more than a dozen people who attended the gala and contacted everyone on its organizing committee, though only a handful returned telephone calls. Six members of the Garrison Ball’s 13-person organizing committee released a statement Tuesday, saying none of them asked the mayor to leave.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay, who was at the gala, said he chatted with Mayor Ford briefly. “He looked fine to me,” Mr. MacKay wrote in an e-mail.

Former budget chair Mike Del Grande, who in that post was one of Mayor Ford’s most loyal supporters, characterized Mr. Ainslie’s comments as “sour grapes” because Mr. Ainslie did not receive the budget chair position he had coveted earlier this year.

A CBC report confirmed that no member of the Gala's organizing committee asked Ford to leave the event and denies that Councillor Ainslie told anyone to remove Ford:

..the Garrison Ball's volunteer organizing committee said in an email statement to CBC News on Tuesday that they did not ask Ford to leave the Feb. 23 event. 

"No member of the event’s organizing committee, including Councillor Paul Ainslie, directed the mayor to leave the event that night," the email said.

The Toronto Star has lied about Rob Ford in the past. I was interviewing Ford during his 2010 mayoral campaign on the day a Toronto Star story was published alleging that Ford had assaulted a high school football player he was coaching. Ford had to interrupt the interview a number of times to take calls from staff and supporters who were trying to locate the player so he could set the record straight. Either Ford was telling the truth, or he is the best actor I've ever met, and I've worked on movies where the lead actors were nominated for and/or won an Academy Award.

In the end, the player, who disliked Ford, refuted the Star's account, though the left-wing newspaper stubbornly refused to apologize for its lies.

The Star has fanatically opposed Ford before and since his election victory. It did so to the point where more than one Star columnist not only insinuated, but outright declared that Torontonians must be "nuts" because they supported the cost-cutting municipal politician.

Rob Ford's success is alarming to the Star for a variety of reasons. They include that Ford is an opponent of the Star's special interest allies. Ford's popularity is like a slap in the face to the Star's editorial board, serving as a daily reminder that they are irrelevant to political opinion in the city in any substantive way.

Something The Star's propagandists should realize by now is that when it comes to his electability, no one cares what they say about Ford. It doesn't matter if he is drunk, grabbed the rear-end of an attention-seeking social climber, gave the finger to an obnoxious driver or whatever.

The people who support Ford do so because, unlike the politicians the Star favors, he doesn't spend other people's money like a drunken sailor. He has kept taxes and spending down and fought the predatory public unions to the point where they have accepted contracts the city can afford.

The Star's vendetta of hysteria, smears, lies, insults and mudslinging only solidifies support for the beleaguered mayor. At this point, Toronto's largest circulation daily's credibility about the city's mayor is no better than Pravda's reports about America were during the Soviet era or Iran's Press TV reports are about its enemies Canada and Israel.

So bring it on al Starzeera. Every time you pick a battle with Ford, he gets stronger and you look more desperate and ridiculous.


-----

(in the video below, at an event yesterday held at City Hall to honor legendary Canadian boxer George Chuvalo, the Toronto Star reporter acts like a no-class jerk, harassing not only Ford, but Chuvalo with questions about Ford's "drinking")

UPDATE: Chrisie Blatchford's column on the Toronto Star acting like despicable high school bullies who think they're in a 'cool clique'

The Apocalypse must be coming!!

Could this be the sign that the reign of man on earth is ending?  I can't think of another explanation for why Heather Mallick has written another column in the last year that isn't characteristically completely bat sh*t crazy.

First she was quite reasonably opposed to the sexism of the Valley Park Middle School Mosqueteria.

And now she actually agrees with federal Immigration Minister Jason Kenney about the need for immigrants to have command of one of Canada's official languages, as well as saying that charges should be dropped against an Indian restaurant owner in Toronto who threw spices at a thief.

But perhaps we can breathe a little easier knowing not all the signs of the End of Days is yet upon us.  Comfortingly, Haroon Siddiqui is still as stupid as ever.

Toronto Star's Christopher Hume gets Heather Mallick to ghostwrite column

At least today's histrionic rant against Rob Ford by al Starzeera's resident mouthpiece for the condo industry sounds like it was written by Mallick.

Time hasn’t forgotten Toronto, but Toronto would like to forget time.   

Under its new mayor, Rob Ford, the city is turning back the clock to the good old days of the chief magistrate’s imagining. Never one to be distracted by reality, Ford believes that we can ignore — no, undo — the changes that have redrawn the face of Toronto during recent years and return to some white-bread suburban utopia that never existed.

No one should underestimate the power of illusion, of course, but just months after Ford took office, the credibility gap between what we know and what he says has been stretched to the breaking point.

In Rob Ford’s Toronto there is no need for public heath nurses. There are no poor people, no gays, no immigrants, no cyclists, no need for housing and nothing the market can’t fix.

That this is nonsense goes without saying. While Ford’s hordes cheer him on in the most unseemly manner, cutting off their collective nose to spite their collective face, they have little to offer aside from insults and jeers. Not believing themselves a part of Toronto, they are content to watch as it is dismantled by the mayor.

Though it has quickly become predictable, the glee with which Ford’s hordes greet his every bêtise still disturbs. The sort of casual civic destructiveness Ford has legitimized in Toronto reminds one of what happened recently in Vancouver. Toronto hasn’t experienced riots — at least not since police went on a rampage during the G20 summit last summer — but both events demonstrate the human capacity for and love of destruction for its own sake.

The rest here

Heather Mallick: Crazy about Stephen Harper

The Toronto Star's Heather Mallick, demonstrating her usual histrionic doltishness, seems determined to do for Stephen Harper what she did for Rob Ford; create such hysterical nonsense that it actually helps the campaign of the person she viscerally hates.

In her column in today's Star, her unconcealed loathing of Harper is reminiscent of her notorious piece cleverly dubbed by colunmist Rick McGuiness as "Heather Mallick's hate-f*ck with Rob Ford."  In that, she treated her readers to an imagined sexual tryst with the then-mayoral candidate (now Toronto's mayor) and her disgust and self-loathing at its aftermath.  That column suggested an author so unhinged as to evoke the idea at the radical leftist website rabble.ca that Mallick was actually an agent provocateur working to get Ford elected.

In her column today, Mallick imagines a Canada where Steven Harper's Conservatives form a majority government.

Harper's detractors have accused him of being a 'dictator,' although always omitting how it's possible to be so in a minority government where the opposition parties could have ousted him at any time. Since Canadians are no less free and have no fewer rights since Harper became Prime Minister in 2006, sane people might be surprised at Mallick's contention that the result of a Conservative majority would be, "Guns on the street, gated communities, rampant drug use, unlimited anonymous corporate political donations, no government safety standards for food and medicine.."

But that's just for starters!

It seems that there's something about conservative politicians that sends Mallick's brain into spin-out mode, not that she's known for rational pronouncements at the best of times. What might be vaguely clever as satire seems a sign of mental instability when she seriously proposes that "Harper's targeting of perceived enemies verges on the Stalinist." Either Mallick has absolutely no familiarity with the history of Stalinist Russia, or she exhibits a pathology about Harper that needs to be resolved by physicians rather than politicians.

According to Mallick, in a Harper majority, "women's rights would retreat, including abortion rights, access to medical advances and the right to go to court to protest inequality."

After invoking comparisons to Stalin and the Khmer Rouge, Mallick concludes with: "Fear these people. Don't get sick. Don't grow old. Don't have children. Make yourself invulnerable."

Mallick hasn't made me change my opinion about Harper. But it does confirm the Toronto Star's commitment to employment equity. Evidently, exhibiting signs of paranoid schizophrenia does not disqualify someone from getting a job as a columnist there.

Playing Heather Mallick's psycho-sexual "Where's Waldo?"

I don't read Toronto Star columnists on a daily basis.

Oh, what he would have made of Heather!

With the exception of Angelo Persichilli, they really don't offer much that justifies the time, no matter how brief. Although I have to confess a rather perverse interest in reading Heather Mallick on occasion. Not because she's interesting or clever or insightful. I don't find her to be any of those things. But reading her column is like playing a game of sexual "Where's Waldo?"

No matter how inappropriate, no matter how irrelevant, she always, always, seems to find some way of sexualizing her subject. And not pleasant sex, but violent, coercive sex. It's like Mallick's devoted her life's work to proving Sigmund Freud right. And to my shame, every so often, I'll read her column to see where her psycho-sexual obsession will pop up.

It's been some time since I played that game. It became too easy, as if Waldo was standing right in the front of the picture, arms akimbo. But I decided to go try it again with Mallick's last two columns to see if she's outgrown her old habit, or perhaps found some apparently needed help.

She hasn't.

Last Friday, she wrote a predictable (for her) condemnation of British PM David Cameron's sensible observations about the failure of multiculturalism. I made it through most of the column without encountering a bizarre sexual metaphor and thought, "This could be it! Mallick, albeit late, has begun a new chapter in her life!"

No such luck.  The last third of her column invokes, for reasons unknown to anyone but Heather Mallick, a non-sequitur mention of a scene from the TV show The Sopranos, where a stripper is beaten to death.

That was just one sentence in an otherwise routine column. I figured it'd be worth a look at her next Star column to see if maybe, just maybe, there was at least movement in the right direction.

Her next column was about Amy Chua's memoir,  Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.   Chua, who is an accomplished lawyer, academic and author, wrote about using draconian child-rearing techniques to produce highly successful children. One may agree or disagree about whether Chua's ideas are ultimately beneficial.

But Mallick, in her disdain for Chua, applies criticism through her signature, and seemingly only literary device; weird sexual projection. This time involving Chua's then-14 year old daughter:   

Chua is hopeless about sex and cannot see that the photo of Sophia playing at Carnegie Hall shows a 14-year-old wearing a charcoal strapless gown, her legs fanned, her arms arched in a purely erotic pose. When a vicious piano teacher in Budapest (Elfriede Jelinek won a Nobel Prize for writing about women like this) whips Lulu’s playing fingers with a pencil and Chua backs the teacher, you wonder what Chua would have done if the teacher had fondled the child’s breasts. Tell Lulu to pull herself together and shut up?

I know who I'd like to tell to pull herself together and shut up.

Maybe that's not fair. Heather needs to express her feelings. Whether they would be more appropriately addressed to a psychiatrist than the Toronto Star's readers is another question.

Rick Salutin returns to a major daily newspaper.. and no one notices

The Looney Left went crazy a few months ago when the Globe and Mail replaced Rick Salutin's column with one from Irshad Manji.

"A blow to "progressive" (read: regressive) voices in the media" was the gist of their shrill cries. As of last Friday, Salutin has been writing for The Toronto Star. His first column for the Liberal-leaning paper was ostensibly a review of a TV series called NCIS, but Salutin being Salutin, it was filled with undertones about the evils of the United States.

One would think all those people who decried Salutin's firing from the Globe would be cheering his return with great fanfare.

But such was not the case. In the 3 days since his article was published online, it managed to draw only 3 user comments and virtually no attention.

Maybe it's because in the Globe, his column stood out. Whereas in the Star, among raving fanatics like Linda McQuaig, Haroon Siddiqui, Antonia Zerbisias, and James Travers, Salutin gets lost in the crowd. In fact, he seems relatively sane compared to his new colleagues, particularly when considering that Heather Mallick is one of them.

Halloween comes early!

It's still two and a half weeks till Halloween, but it's come early to the Toronto Star.

If you're brave enough to see something really scary, then click here. But don't blame me if you get nightmares!

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

Persichilli: One of the few voices of sanity at al-Starzeera

There's one columnist at al-Starzeera whom I haven't mentioned previously in this blog and I regret that.

Partially, it's because his column only appears once a week on Sundays and the other reason is that his main gig is as political editor of the Italian-Canadian newspaper Corriere Canadese, so I don't think of him so much as being a Star columnist.

But he is and he deserves mention, because he is one of the few editorial anomalies in the organization that gives a forum to the habitually uninformed hysteria of James Travers, Heather Mallick, Haroon Siddiqui, Christopher Hume, Antonia Zerbisias, Linda McQuaig, et cetera.

There are a couple of others, like Martin Regg Cohn, to be sure, but they are the rare exceptions in that organization.

Angelo Persichilli's column are routinely informative, insightful and he actually has the connections in Ottawa and the Liberal Party to be able to report based on credible information rather than wild, paranoid speculation.

Today he wrote a column about what Rob Ford's candidacy represents that has shown a level of insight and maturity that reminded me how out of place he is at The Toronto Star.  I don't agree with Persichilli about his notion of bike lanes being such a representation of the urban/suburban and elitist/public divide. If that were the case than Rocco Rossi wouldn't be the last-place candidate with single digit polling numbers. But basically, Persichilli nails it:

Rob Ford is neither a candidate to fear nor a political phenomenon. He is only an individual who is in the right place at the right time. The Oct. 25 vote is not about Ford, it’s a referendum on outgoing Mayor David Miller and his cronies.

This campaign is about four things: the repudiation of Miller’s vision of Toronto; the revolt of the suburban “colonies”; the frustration of people in the downtown core; and the inability of the other candidates to understand the first three of these factors.

Miller thinks that his Toronto is the real Canada. He’s wrong. Miller’s Toronto it’s only a distillation of this complex country seen through magnifying, distorting glasses. His Toronto is a concentration of Canadian virtues and imperfections, blown up and stuffed together into a few square kilometres around city hall.

There we have the best museums, art galleries and universities, but also a lot of ignorance just a few hundred metres away from those institutions. There are religious icons like St. Michael’s Cathedral, but also in the same street many organizations that are challenging Catholic doctrine. You find the opulent banks at Bay and King, but also food banks around the corner. There are the beautiful houses of the Rosedale enclave, but also a lot of homeless people. There are expensive and fancy cars, but also people who cannot even afford the TTC.

Miller didn’t deal with any of these contradictions. He made them worse by promoting petty projects like bike lanes that were sold as a social revolution, an environmental game-changer. His approach to government has been much like the behaviour of rich socialites who pollute the environment with their SUVs and private planes or sully the lakes in Muskoka with their powerboats and then engage in petty projects such as sending their children to volunteer at the food bank or to some camp in a Third World country for a photo-op to fabricate a social conscience.

Miller’s administration is identified with traffic jams that are fouling the environment; a “special relationship” with the unions and friendly, costly contractors; the garbage strike, which exposed his lack of leadership; waste; tax increases and, most of all, the typical in-your-face attitude of a messiah who thinks he can disregard the opinions of his ignorant subjects.

Read the rest of his column here.

Heather Mallick: Agent Provocateur?

A lot of people have been observing recently that crazed, histrionic attacks in the media on Toronto mayoral candidate Rob Ford are actually driving his support up.

The most egregious example is the demented column by Heather Mallick in al-Starzeera (The Toronto Star) where she equates the city's support for Ford to a drunken one-night stand, which she describes in all-too-graphic, sexualized detail.

Even the dim bulbs who frequent the online Marxist propaganda organ, rabble.ca have begun to question this tactic and wonder out loud whether Heather Mallick is an "agent provocateur" working for Ford.

Ha!

I called it yesterday - Rob Ford's poll surge sends Heather Mallick deeper into the depths of madness

Yesterday, I predicted Ford's more than doubling his lead over nearest rival George Smitherman would send Toronto Star columnist and pompous elitist Heather Mallick further along in the public mental breakdown we see evidenced weekly in her columns.

Okay. Fair's fair. I didn't have to be Nostradamus to see that one coming. And for accuracy's sake, it should be observed that Mallick's phenomenal bouts of  irrational exhibitionism may have more to do with her own internal brain chemistry than Rob Ford's popularity. But Ford certainly seems to be a catalyst in the collapse of her coherency.

In the newest installment of our popular feature, "Today's craziness from Heather Mallick", she offers the following:

It is Oct. 26, the day after the election, and you wake in a hard, unfamiliar bed. Your eyeballs are congealed chip fat and your contact lenses have gone crispy. Your liver is en route somewhere. You appear to be missing a tooth. And there's something in bed next to you. It is the sweaty, beer-smelling oik from the bar last night.

Of course, you'll say what you always say, “As God is my witness, I will never ever do this again.”

Interestingly, this isn't the first time Mallick has used the one-night stand analogy in her column. It seems she is making that a monthly feature. I'm not going to speculate on what might be behind this bizarre propensity of hers, since Heather Mallick's sex life is something that should remain the exclusive and private domain of Heather Mallick. If only she felt the same way.

But there's more... sadly, much more..

Then a passing car will dump a gallon of salty brown slush on my head in January as I walk to work. The TTC is pouting, the snowplows are parked, and the gentle City employees who counsel on power and pipes are manning a picket line and warming their hands on those eternally fashionable oil drum fires.

It's all fun until it isn't fun, just like that night you spent with that Ford guy you met in the bar. Ford's monstrous regiment will slip on the icy sidewalks and break their hips. Shovelling their own streets by hand, they will fall into their homemade snowbanks and won't be found till spring. “Bring out the dead,” will come the cry of ragged-trousered volunteer brigades hauling wooden carts.

Status anxiety did us in. Fearing the future and hoarding our own stash of money and self-esteem, we wanted to stick it to the arrogant politicians we resented.

If this were pure satire, as poorly executed as it may be, that would be one thing. But there's a dark malevolence to her words. It doesn't seem as much to be satire as it does the manifestation of a seething hatred.

You can read her column from today's Star in its entirety here, but be warned, if you are under the influence of psychedelic drugs, reading Mallick could cause permanent brain damage. (Which evidently is not an impediment to getting a job as a columnist at The Toronto Star.)

Take a deep breath and make an appointment with your therapist, Heather. When Ford's elected, your taxes will go down, your streets will get repaved, some of your friends who finance their lifestyles with undeserved municipal welfare payments arts grants may actually have to demonstrate to the real world that they have talent, or get a job, so they'll be mooching off you, but otherwise life as you know it will go on.

And you can be grateful for all the many things you'll be able to bitch about.

UPDATE: Best comment of the day and most disturbing image of the campaign: Heather Mallick's "Hate-F#ck with Rob Ford,"  Followed closely by Bob Divine's " I think that woman is hanging out at the wrong kind of bars. "

UPDATE 2: Heather seems to have serious issues and her column is her Talk Therapy

The best thing about Rob Ford's polling surge - the city's elitist a-holes are tearing their hair out

Which doesn't account for Smitherman and Rossi being bald, they started out the campaign that way.

There is but one place for them to put their hope and it is my candidacy  George "I am the messiah" Smitherman

George Smitherman's hysteria at his free fall from what he thought was going to be a coronation to an almost universal rejection has sent him into crazed, messianic, self-delusional statements like, "This is a bit of an alarm for people over what's happening in their city and to line up behind one vision -- a destructive, reckless one or one that is about city building. There is but one place for them to put their hope and it is my candidacy ... We will fight for our city to the end."

As Blazing Cat Fur noted, the addition of famed Liberal party strategist Warren Kinsella hasn't helped Rocco Rossi's polling numbers, but it has made him look desperate and pathetic with his ill-advised and almost universally condemned proposal to revisit the Spadina Expressway as an underground tunnel.

What I find personally gratifying is the idiotic, sanctimonious, histrionic blathering by The Toronto Star's mouthpiece for the condo developers' lobby, Christopher Hume, who wrote "the rise of Rob Ford should come as no surprise. It is yet another manifestation of the wave of nasty right-wing populism sweeping North America. Its newly emboldened hordes may not know what they need, but they know what they want"

Speaking as one of the horde, Torontonians don't want is to be ignored by their politicians and be told how we should think by self-absorbed socialists. We don't need to be told how our "visionary leaders" know what's best for us, whether or not we agree.

Heather Mallick already accused Toronto of being "nuts" when it looked like the city was on the verge of electing Ford. Now that it seems a near-certainty, she must be having a complete mental breakdown (I wonder to what extent that will even be noticeable). I look forward to reading her next rant on the subject.

Welcome to democracy, comrades. I know you hate it. It must be frustrating for Hume, Mallick, Miller and their ilk to be so convinced of their own intellectual superiority yet remain unable to comprehend how they can't do as good a job of convincing the public as their supposed inferiors.

I could explain it to them in one sentence, but why bother; they'd never believe it.


UPDATE: This condescending email just went out from the Smitherman campaign. With little of his own virtue to offer, "I am the messiah" George is going in for all-out panicked fear-mongering with:

If an election were held tomorrow Rob Ford would be mayor.

That’s what two new public opinion polls out tonight show. They also show that George Smitherman is the only candidate who can stop Rob Ford.

While Joe Pantalone, Sarah Thompson and Rocco Rossi have all made important contributions to this election race, they cannot become Mayor.

George represents the best of Toronto’s values: tolerance and respect, hard work, caring, balance and honesty. Over the next five weeks we must redouble our efforts to present George to the people of Toronto and to give them a clear choice: Rob Ford’s city of division, recklessness and anger, and George’s city of bringing people together, balance and sensible choices.

We need your help to fight for our vision of Toronto. We need you to attend debates and events and to actively cheer George on; we need you to staff the telephones and to knock on doors; and most especially we need you to talk to your friends and co-workers. Now is the time to get active.

In yesterday’s New York Times Michael Bloomberg, New York’s Mayor, said "Anger, is not a government strategy," he added. "It’s not a way to govern." He was speaking about the tide in America, but he could just as easily have been talking about the anger being exploited by Rob Ford in Toronto.

Today's craziness from Heather Mallick

This could turn out to be a regular feature. Thanks Heather.  To someone who writes a blog pointing out hypocrisy and idiocy in the media, you're a gift.

Today's installment:  apparently in Canada, we're not much better than societies that condone "honor killings" since it took police so long to catch serial killer Robert Picton.

Uh, sure..if you say so Heather.

Heather Mallick: Stupid, Crazy or both?

You decide.

"Wasn’t Blair a big liar, a Bliar? Reading his fascinating, appalling autobiography is exactly like this. The reader slips in and out of moral consciousness.

Blair’s still shifty, his face on the cover foxlike and even devilish-looking. I grew to loathe him soon after his election in 1997 such that I began boycotting Britain and vacationing in France instead. Along came Nicolas Sarkozy, the most unprincipled politician in Europe, so I take it we will be holidaying in Algonquin Provincial Park or possibly Tristan da Cunha, wherever people are honest and true. "

To be fair to Mallick, she's not the only nutcase at The Star.

It appears that with the Globe and Mail moving further to the left, the Star wants to try to compete for the ultra-leftist reader with rabble.ca.

The Star's Heather Mallick throws a hissy fit!

It must be very frustrating for Toronto's socialists. They are convinced they are so much smarter and more sophisticated than the rest of us, yet they can't muster the intellect to make as persuasive a case to the voters as Rob Ford has done.

Why aren't people listening to the Left that wants us to vote for Joe Pantalone? It couldn't possibly be that they aren't our intellectual superiors. So how to explain the phenomenon? Heather Mallick at the Star has come up with the answer: It must be that everyone else is crazy!

See also:  Blazing Cat Fur: Toronto Star Gives Up On Derailing Rob Ford Campaign Allows Heather Mallick To Insult Torontonians