Kathy “Relapsed Catholic” Shaidle is not handling David Miller’s mayoral election victory very well:
Toronto’s new civic slogan is: WHAT ASH-HEAP OF HISTORY?
Torontonians have elected a man whose heroes are pompous blowhard Bruce Springsteen and two-faced millionaire RFK Jr. I wonder how long the heroin shooting galleries will take to show up in Parkdale storefronts.
Of course, a quick perusal of Kathy’s blog archives will show her hero is drooling hyper-reactionary pin-up Ann Coulter. Given Kathy’s gift for hyperbole and her tendency to paint Toronto’s entire Chinese community with the same “why do we let these people in the country?” brush, you can always say “I wonder how long it’ll be before she writes an article claiming that the blood of white babies is a necessary ingredient in egg rolls”.
I anticipate the return salvo. Feel free to throw your two cents in the comments, and let’s keep the barbs witty and civilized. I’ll try and answer as quickly as I can, but there’s some software that ain’t gonna write itself.
I’m sure David Janes will represent the Reasonable Right with a less-drooly writeup soon (he’s got a kid and has to software that ain’t gonna write itself — and in Java, no less — so I understand that I’ll have to wait for his take).
My favourite summaries so far are by Rick McGinnis on his election blog.
Now I have to go and make the Internet a better place. More later!
3 replies on “From our bulging "I haven’t seen a ranter this cartoonish since ‘J. Jonah Jameson’ in the old <em>Spider-Man</em> cartoon" file”
I’m actually doing C++ today. I prototyped the entire project in Python, and now doing Java and C++ ports. Argg, my frickin head is spinning.
-David
Sure that rant is a little OTT, but David Miller is a fucking moron. I can’t believe Toronto voted him in. Did you hear his acceptance speech? What the fuck does “I’m gunna open the front door of city hall and lock the back rooms!” mean? Apart from the sputterings of another bullshitting politician.
He used the whole ridiculous “Toronto Island Airport Expansion” as a smokescreen to the fact that he couldn’t understance finance if his life depended on it. Bah! Just what we need: another moron as the mayor of Toronto.
“A little OTT [over-the-top]?”
Your gift for understatement is as good as Kathy’s gift for hyperbole. Perhaps it’s time for the two of you to don costumes and fight crime!
But seriously: I thought of the opposition to the Toronto Island Airport Expansion as a smaller part of a New Urbanist approach, which I strongly agree with. High-volume traffic corridors such as freeways and airports have to be laid out carefully, as they’re barriers that split areas just as effectively as walls and create zones of desolation around them. That’s where your classic urban problems begin. I strongly recommend checking out Emergence or The Death and Life of Great American Cities for further explanations of this theory as well as other urban design maxims.
Like a number of other bloggers who talked about the election, the decision in my mind was between Miller and Tory, and in the end, Miller won out for his New Urbanist approach over Tory and his “run the city like a business” approach. City-as-business approaches give you abominations like developer-sell-outs like Harbourfront and Dundas Square, the other private-masquerading-as-public spaces where you’re subject to arrest for gathering in too large a group or playing accordion because some tourist’s kid asked “can you play that for me please?”
Just in case I’ve fallen prey to some kind of American disease in which I’ve been deluded into thinking that our less-that-bright leader is actually some kind of genius, could you provide some examples of Miller’s lack of mental acuity? And then why smarts should matter when
(a) they might not, if you’re driven enough and surround yourself with the right aides, as Dubya has proven, and
(b) they may actually be a hindrance, as this article suggests?