The CanaDoper Café, 2013 edition.

The story on Global Toronto now says that no one asked him to leave, and that the other city councillors haven’t seen his supposed “chronic alcoholism.” From a mile high, it does look like a hatchet job on an easy target.

Perhaps Mr. Ford might try not being such an easy target. :slight_smile:

Ford strikes me as a willfully ignorant lowest-common-denominator populist, but these constant attacks are starting to have the reverse of their intended effect - they are actually generating sympathy for the guy. The impression conveyed (whether truthfullly or not) is that they are mostly bullshit, a classic smear campaign.

Of course, the fact that Ford appears aggressively, willfully stupid makes smearing him easy. :wink:

By The Toronto Star? That unbiased and reputable newspaper known for its journalistic integrity?

I’m shocked.
(The Toronto Star is a rag of a newspaper. One step above the National Inquirer.)

I don’t mean to turn this into a baseball debate thread, but who thought it impossible that a really good hitter who happened to be born in British Columbia could win an MVP Award? Speaking as a guy who follows baseball more closely than he follows his own extended family, I don’t recall anyone expressing the idea that it was impossible for a Canadian to win an MVP Award. Certainly, Larry Walker winning one - Walker was already an established star, and had twice before been in the top ten in MVP voting - was not something that people considered shocking. Certainly many non-American players had won MVP Awards before.

Might you be thinking of the Toronto Sun? The Sun is the rabble rousing tabloid and the Star is the smug, socially conscious “intelligent” paper

The Star puts on a show of being smart but it’s still a horrible paper. As bad as the Sun, no, but it’s a pretty stupid newspaper that does not appeal to the smarter part of one’s brain.

Most Toronto papers are lousy, you have-

Toronto Star - smug, obsessively left-wing
National Post - smug, obsessively right-wing
Toronto Sun - tabloid for rednecks
Globe and Mail - probably the best of the bunch; but geared toward bean counters & businessmen; can be boring

One would have a great paper by cobbling together all their best parts, though. They all have some good writers, even the Sun.

If the guy genuinely has problems with alcohol, I have sympathy for him. That doesn’t mean that I want him running the city, or that his gaffes aren’t newsworthy (although taking pictures of him buying booze or KFC is pretty lame), or that the rules don’t apply to him somehow.

The one time that I thought a Toronto Star hatchet job made him look more sympathetic was during the mayoral campaign when some guy called Ford on the phone pretending to have medical problems and secretly recorded Ford recommending illegal painkillers if he was having trouble getting legal ones. That was just pointless and cheap.

Certainly him being a problem drinker would be newsworthy - but I’m not left with any confidence it is true just because the Star claims it is.

This reminds me of an anecdote sometimes attributed to LBJ. (I believe by Hunter S Thompson) regarding getting a politician to deny something thus making it an issue. Allegedly, he reports on a conversation between a campaign manger and LBJ during a difficult campaign in Texas.

LBJ wished that a rumour be spread that his opponent enjoyed ‘relations’ with one of his barn yard sows.

His campaign manager replied ‘Christ, you can’t call him a pig f**ker’.

LBJ said ‘No, but I want to see him deny it!’ :smiley:

It’s an old variant of the “where there is smoke there is fire”. Make the accusations come fast and furious and the impression is given that Ford is a corrupt, ass-grabbing drunk (to name three of the accusations). The fact that he’s an undoubted loudmouthed lout gives the accusations sting. To counter these accusations legally by means of libel actions, Ford would have to spend much of his time in litigation, which would take years, cost hundreds of thousands, and keep the stories current for a long time.

Now, the accusations could of course all be true, and I don’t know if they are or aren’t; but colour me somewhat skeptical.

As a person who also spends an inordinate amount of time following baseball, I recall it was a huge deal when a Canadian won the MVP for the first time. With the possible exception of Fergie Jenkins a generation earlier, Walker was the best Canadian ball player ever and was performing at an extraordinary level. In a country where the ball diamonds are covered in snow for half the year, it surprised a lot of people that we could produce such a specimen, even granted that BC doesn’t have the snow issues that most of the rest of us do.

These days, of course, indoor training facilities are much more common, so it’s easier to conduct year-round baseball training, but even as recently as the early 90s, that simply wasn’t something many Candians had access to.

Yes, several non-Americans had won MVP awards prior to Walker’s win, but all of them had come from warmer, more baseball-friendly climates.

To this day, the best athletes in this country play hockey. That is a plain and simple fact of life in Canada and one which I have seen innumerable times as a coach. Consequently, it is always newsworthy when one of our own makes a splash in a sport other than hockey because it doesn’t happen every day. Larry Walker was one of the guys who opened the eyes of Canada’s youth to the possibility of excelling in a sport that doesn’t involve ice or a hardened rubber disk.

What would be really great is if people looked up to non-sports people half as much as they do to those who play games for a living.

It’s possible to do both.

Yeah, I’m not a Ford fan, but some of the more recent ‘scandals’ seem almost too much.

Tell me that you’ve seen Ford driving recklessly or ignoring conflict of interest rules and I’ll pretty much take you at your word. But I’ll wait for more evidence on this new stuff.

What?!? I don’t want to live in a world where Frederick Banting is mentioned in as high regard as Sydney Crosby!

Do you think Paul Ainslie is just making stuff up or exaggerating or what?

What really drives me nuts is Ford’s standard approach of “I didn’t do it, and that includes the stuff I actually did”.

CBC:

I don’t know how much weight to give Mr Ainslie’s statements since I don’t really know much about him. I don’t worry about it too much since there’s already so many reasons to dislike Ford/want him out of office that I don’t need to go looking for more.

Who did Banting play for again?

Not Banting – Bunting. He introduced Canadian baseball to China.