I have just completed reading Tony Blair’s bio, in which he complains a lot about the media. He said that if there is the slightest hint of some scandal or failure, you cannot get the media to focus on your policy objectives. They will be buried under pages of some potential scandal.I have no great love for Blair or Ford (a thug & barbarian), but from Singapore to Johannesburg and everywhere in between, he is in the headlines. Now Anderson Cooper is arriving back from the Philippines and going to interview ford. The newspapers here daily have 10-20 pages of breathless opinion pieces by every journalist.
It is somewhat amusing that the media have not been able to report the final coup de gracefor Ford. When the previously blacked out police report was uncovered, the media buried on about p. 5 that two of his female staffers said that**said that he said to one of them I have f… you, and now i am going to eat your …y!. Later as he pushed packed thru a scrum at City Hall, he denied saying it and said *I am a happily married man. I get more than enough *to eat at home. Well, you would think it could not possibly get worse, but it did. He then brought his always cloistered wife from home to City Hall which has almost never happened, and had the poor woman stand next to him staring intently at her shoes, while he once again apologized for doing that which even Homer Simpson would never do/say.
As bad as he is, he is a monster created by the former mayor and city council. He sat at the back for years & urged them to get a grip on their wild spending - & they sneered and ignored him - thinking the voters were not listening. But they were, and hence, Mayor Ford.
Finally, I have listened for 41 yrs to Canadians and Cdn media crow about how far superior Canada & Canadians are to those awful Americans and the U.S. Now, with 3 Fed. senators expelled for fraud, a nightmare Mayor, a gas plant that cost $1B but was never built, plus $1 B. for E-health which also never existed, we can say that a lot of Canadians and its media bought and paid for the crow they now must consume.
It’s not super clear what your opinion is here.
If you’re suggesting Ford is something Toronto deserved, of course you’re right. They voted him in. They also voted in his predecessor, a precise opposite of Ford, a snooty, downtown-obsessed leftist who felt the streets of Etobicoke and Scarborough were not fit for him to walk upon and whose handling of the public sector unions left many wondering who he really worked for; had David Miller never been elected, Rob Ford would never have been elected. His constant braying about councillor’s expense reports would have been largely forgotten were it not for the pendulum having swung so far the other way from 2003 to 2010, as well as a sequence of other events; the economic downtown, the hapless ineptitude of his electoral opponents, etc.
That doesn’t change the fact that Ford has lost all moral authority to retain his job, and if he had a shred of honor he’d resign.
What’s interesting about Ford, to me at least, is that he is stupid. He’s legitimately one of the few actually stupid major politicians I can think of. Some politicians are mean, like Stephen Harper, or wildly out of touch, like Michael Ignatieff, or clueless, like Mitt Romney, or ideologically blind or whatever, but very few are actually STUPID, like sub-100 IQs. I think Justin Trudeau is a silly flake and Brian Mulroney was almost pathologically dishonest and Jack Layton was a weasel, but I would never say they were stupid. All were or are smart people. I don’t for the life of me understand why so many Americans want Hillary Clinton to be the President but she’s a very smart person. Rob Ford is stupid, plain and simple. He’s a complete dumbass. He’s a bad Mayor and IMHO would probably be bad at almost any job, because he just isn’t very bright. If you get him off the booze and crack he’ll still be stupid.
How many threads on this clown do we need? Is there a reason this couldn’t have been put into the existing Rob Ford thread?
That’s a nice, broad brush you have there.
Canadians–at least most of them–had nothing to do with electing Mr. Ford, nor with constructing gas plants. Your complaint lies with the voters in Toronto and Ontario, respectively. To claim that Canadians, as a whole, are responsible for these things is, IMHO, indicative of somebody who is unaware of all the facts. It is akin to blaming all Americans for what happens in New York.
And what to do about the Senate is currently being argued before the Supreme Court of Canada. True, the media hasn’t had a lot to say–as yet–but I’m sure that the media and pundits will have a field day once the SCC releases its decision.
Many Americans seem to be ignorant of the fact that Canada is much like the United States: it has cities whose voters elect mayors, it has provinces (same as states) that govern within their own borders, and it has a constitution that mandates how it is governed, and which is subject to change. To claim that today’s Canadians as a whole, are responsible for Toronto’s Mayor Ford, Ontario’s energy decisions, and a Senate whose makeup was decided upon 146 years ago, is (to me anyway), unfair to all Canadians.