Month: November 2013

The National Post has been doing a killer job on covering the Rob Ford story. They’ve even dug up a quote of his from 2005, back when he was a city councillor, where he — despite not being a doctor or in public health, and allegedly having close ties to the drug trade on both the supply and demand sides — said that harm reduction doesn’t work:

“You’re not helping them, you’re enabling them,” Mr. Ford said. “They’re going to smoke that crack whether you give them those crack pipes or not. They’re going to shoot that heroin whether you give them clean needles or not. If people want a change, it has to come from within.”

“You have to get these people into rehabilitation and if they don’t want to go, well, then you just enforce the law. If it’s illegal, you arrest them. That’s the bottom line and if they have to dry out in jail — great,” he said.

“I know for a fact that tough love has worked and I’m talking from personal experience. If you just enable someone and give them a place to live and money, nothing changes,” Mr. Ford said.

The Post has been doing such great work on Rob Ford, despite the fact that the politics he claims to support is right up their “George W. Bush Lite” alley. It’s almost as if they’re trying to atone for something.

Oh yeah, I remember now:

The Daily Show and The Colbert Report had a field day with Rob Ford’s belated admission that yes he did smoke crack — and hey, it was during one of his drunken stupours, so that’s different, amirite?

The Daily Show, November 4, 2013

The Daily Show, November 5, 2013

Jon Stewart makes a great point on the November 5th Daily Show:

“Mayor Ford’s a lot of fun to ridicule. My guess is, not a lot of fun to eulogize.”

He also says something I agree with as a humour writer: Even though I’d lose a lot of good source material, I’d much rather Rob Ford went into rehab and cleaned out rather than have to write an article that began with something like “While I disagreed with the guy on many, many, many points, I didn’t want to see him die tragically from an overdose/substance-fuelled misadventure/drug gang-related incident”.

The Colbert Report, November 5, 2013

The phrase “Chris Farley tribute mayor” is apt in so many ways.

After all these months, Toronto’s Peter Griffin-esque mayor (and now Marion Barry-esque, minus the Master’s in chemistry and an enviable civil rights record) Rob Ford had no choice but to finally ‘fess up and admit that yes, he did smoke crack. The Toronto Star, who along with the New York gossip site Gawker broke the story, have faced months of accusations from the mayor’s base — often referred to as “Ford Nation” — of fabricating the whole thing in some kind of anti-Ford lefty vendetta, and not the logical conclusion of a lifetime of living off Daddy’s reflected sunlight and label printing company, substance abuse, general buffoonery, and an entourage of pals who still live with their parents and have rap sheets as long as your arm.

I myself tend to the view that as long as no harm directly comes to anyone else, drugs should be treated as a health rather than a criminal issue. My beef with the mayor is the lying to the public — apparently “respect for taxpayers” and “telling the truth to the taxpayers are two markedly different things — and the criminality. He’s got associations with Toronto’s criminal element that run pretty deep, and now Doug Ford (the mayor’s brother, a city councillor, and someone who operates under the delusion that he’s Toronto’s co-mayor) has pretty much declared war on the chief of police for doing his job.

I’m too busy celebrating my birthday in San Francisco as I write this — by the bye, Mayor Ford, this is an amazing birthday present, thanks! — so I’ll leave it to fellow Toronto-based programmer Reg Braithwaite to say what’s on my mind:

Ford Nation are the Ontario equivalent of the Tea Party. Peel back the veneer, and you find someone who truly, deeply feels that “Toronto The Good” doesn’t work. Who feels that it works for someone else. For downtowners, or liberals, or cyclists, or unionized employees, or something else.

Ford Nation thinks Toronto is all about “someone else,” not about them. To Ford Nation, Toronto looks down upon the suburbs and taxpayers, and Ford Nation is angry about that. So Ford Nation elects a man who has but one job to do: Troll Toronto. Disrupt. Delay. Distract.

The primary characteristic of being trolled is when you are trying to achieve something positive, but can’t make any headway because the other party’s agenda is to disrupt and hijack the conversation.

To Ford Nation, nothing getting done is a job well done. Rob Ford wasn’t elected to win respect for taxpayers, Rob Ford was elected to show Ford Nation’s disrespect for City Hall.

And so, all this debate about him smoking crack is irrelevant. Suggestions of rehab are a complete side-show. Rob Ford doesn’t need to go to rehab to get elected. He simply needs to do the job he was hired to do:

Disrupt Toronto, Delay Toronto, and Distract Toronto. All so that the people angry with Toronto can sit back and enjoy a good trolling. And when you make the mistake of trying to reason with them, you’re playing into their hands.

Don’t do that, Toronto. Don’t feed the trolls.

Be sure to read Reg’s full article in the Huffington Post.

Alternate title: Rob Ford’s image consultant.

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Of course, she may just be very good at putting on a pretty smile for the camera while thinking “I am soooo dumping your weasel ass after the game.”

Yes, this is Photoshoppery.

Remember that Simpsons episode when Mr. Burns showed up in a terrible disguise as “Mr. Snrub, from…someplace far away” at a Springfield town hall meeting to suggest that the town give some money to his nuclear power plant?

What sort of person would think that such obvious astroturfing would fool anyone in real life? That person would have to be on crack.

Which brings me to this segment from Bill Carroll’s show on Toronto talk radio station AM640, when an “Ian from Etobicoke” called in to defend our Peter Griffin-esque mayor, Rob Ford:

In response to the stunning similarity between Rob Ford’s and Ian’s voices, Carroll said “This guy, if he’s not the mayor, he could play one on the radio.” And he could — he does sound a lot like His Worship (the proper honorific for the Mayor of Toronto, even if it is Rob Ford). Carroll, whose work in radio means that audio is his medium — he says “I’ve spent my entire career listening to voices, editing tape, interviewing people. I’m almost like a blind guy” — is “90 to 95 percent” sure that “Ian” is actually Rob Ford calling in.

This isn’t the first time that Mayor Ford has used astroturfing to support his positions. Dave Price, who’s now Ford’s director of operations and logistics, used to call in to the mayor’s radio show as “Dave from Etobicoke”, “Dave from Scarborough”, and Dave from various other locations in Toronto and surrounding areas to carpet bomb the Ford brothers with praise. You might be interested to know that Dave was also Rob’s high school football coach and his campaign manager during the 2010 mayoral election.

For those of you with good ears, you can compare “Ian’s” voice from the recording above with these recordings of Rob Ford’s voice. Luckily for us, as a public figure and a guy with his own talk radio show, it’s easy to get samples of Ford’s voice. I’ve provided some below — enjoy!

Rob Ford Voice Samples

“I cannot comment on a video that I’ve never seen, or does not exist”

“Can you get off my driveway, please?!

Takin’ Care of Constituents

Explaining His Comments About Immigration

For those of you not familiar with Toronto, the mayor has a weekly radio show on Sundays called The City, in which he and his brother Doug (who’s on city council, but operates as if he’s the co-mayor of Toronto) operate in permanent campaign mode for free. I listen to it occasionally, and it’s always pure unintentional comedy gold. Here are the three most recent broadcasts…

The City, October 13 Edition

The City, October 20 Edition

The City, October 27 Edition