This has been a crazy week for news in Canada! Scandals within scandals!
Between the scandal about the prime minister’s office covering up Conservative Senator Mike Duffy’s expense scandal, the sanitized Senate audit scandal, and the scandalous video of the Mayor of Toronto smoking crack, I’ve been riveted to my Twitter feed.
Key players have been falling like dominoes. Two Conservative Senators resigned from the Conservative caucus over investigations into their expense claims. The Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff resigned over an improper $90,000 payment to a Senator, and Toronto’s Mayor’s Chief of Staff was fired for apparently telling the Mayor he needed help.
Yesterday a judge ruled that the Conservatives were guilty of election fraud in six ridings in the last federal election, and this barely registered a blip on the political radar because it was overshadowed by bigger scandals.
Mother Nature has been weird this past week too, with wild mood swings, hot flashes, cold sweats and earthquakes.
So anyway, about Toronto’s mayor smoking crack.
Not surprisingly, I don’t like Rob Ford. He’s a vile, arrogant, boorish, obnoxious, repugnant, right-wing bully and he sees those characteristics as qualities. For evidence of this, see the infamous “Fat Fuck†video:
I’m nowhere near as good a person as Bob Rae, who tweeted that nobody with an ounce of sensitivity could take any joy from watching what is happening to Rob Ford. “He needs help,†said Mr. Rae.
I’m not taking joy exactly, but I admit to enjoying it.
When the reports of the crack video first surfaced, I found them entertaining but I was skeptical about the authenticity of any such video. For one thing, Rob Ford’s too fat to be a crack addict. For another thing, as much as I dislike and disrespect him, it seems improbable that he could have such outrageously bad judgement as to allow himself to be filmed smoking crack and making obnoxious comments about ‘fags’ and minorities. The crack video wasn’t some ancient thing dredged up from a misspent youth, either: it was apparently taken sometime in the last six months.
Despite my initial skepticism, I now believe he really does smoke crack. The longer this drags on, and the more his inner circle seems to believe he has a problem, and the more he literally runs and hides from the press and refuses to admit or deny that he smokes crack, the more convinced I become that it’s true. He is behaving like someone who is frightened, irrational, guilty and stubbornly clinging to a lie that nobody else believes.
Meanwhile, his empire crumbles around him. In the past few days he has been fired from his volunteer job and banned from schools in the Toronto Catholic School Board, and he has fired his Chief of Staff, apparently for advising him to go to rehab. City Council’s confidence in him appears to be eroding quickly and there is talk about how to force him out, although apparently there is no mechanism to do so.
My prediction is that Stephen Harper and the Conservatives will – unfortunately – survive their scandals, but Rob Ford is in a political death spiral.
On top of everything else, as he hurtles towards rock bottom there’s probably not a crack dealer in Toronto willing to sell to him right now.
I wonder what he will finally consider rock bottom?
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/05/rob-ford-crack-video-toronto-mayor.html
I am wincing. I had never seen that video before but what a bully is right. To take what may have been an epithet against him and turn it into a thing to bludgeon the reporter with, and smile all the time… But he is incapable of seeing reality. He only sees what he wants to see. I guess I am only surprised that so many people have been taken in by his facade over the years.
You really get a sense of what kind of person he is from that video, don’t you? Petty, nasty, ugly and offensive.
” … there’s probably not a crack dealer in Toronto willing to sell to him right now.”
Cute conclusion, but untrue. They sell if you pay. There’s no honour.
I don’t know about that. I think he’s way too much of a heat score right now for anybody to take the risk of selling to him.
He’ll get away with it tho’ because…HE’S GOT THE VIDEO!
I’m struck that so many news readers and mayoral allies keep calling it a “tape”. It ain’t. It’s digital smoke, wispy little zeros and ones.
I also sorta think if some alleged crack dealer was smart enough to make an alleged iPhone video of the alleged mayor smoking alleged crack, then that alleged crack dealer might be smart enough to find a USB port or two with which to tether that phone. And make copies. For, ummm, data security.
You’d think, eh? $400 G’s is better than $200.
Is it a coincidence that the alleged crack-dealing videographer seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth, (even with $200K ready and waiting for him), at the same time that Rob Ford finally made a statement about the video..chuckling about its non-existence?
Umm, nope?
Maybe Nigel Wright stepped up to the plate on this one too.
I think Ford’s involved in the disappearance of the video too. Like Chris said, when he finally surfaced and said the video didn’t exist, he seemed awfully smug. But what I don’t get is why would he pay for the video knowing that there could so easily be other copies of it? How could he be so sure he was putting an end to this problem?
At any rate, I think this is well beyond his control now. It’s like trying to take the cream out of the coffee.
I don’t think he paid for the video. I think he had the crack dealer killed and destroyed the video!! Sheesh. If you’re going to fashion a conspiracy theory it’s best to go whole hog with it (no allusion intended).
Well, now the Globe is also saying the owner of the video may have been killed and that the Anthony Smith (the guy in the crack photo with Ford) killing was related to the video. Now who would have the most to gain from all these people and the video disappearing??
The other guy in the photo was shot too, but survived. It was Ford’s chief of staff who brought to police attention the information about the possibility of a connection between the murder victim and the video.
Two more staffers resigned from Ford’s office today – a policy advisor and an executive assistant.
The whole thing is ludicrous, but the most ludicrous thing about it is that it’s probably true.
I just heard Ford will be speaking to the press at 4:30 today. Is he quitting?
Or just wishing his departing staff well with their “new opportunities”?
I’m thinking a normal (innocent) person would have cracked (ha) under the pressure by now. That sort of day in, day out stress — not just for the last couple of weeks, but for over a year now…how does he keep going? He just seems to revel in all this attention and drama .. at one point he actually said he felt like a rock star.