The Ford saga

In response to requests from absolutely nobody, here are a couple of thoughts on the drug scandal currently devouring Rob Ford, mayor of Toronto, the big bad city just across the lake.

I'm no street fighting man, but I do remember one piece of advice I heard a long time ago.  If you do find yourself in a brawl, throw your best punch as quickly as you can, because if the other guy's any good, you won't be getting a second chance.  In going after Mayor Ford over the last couple of years, the Toronto Star has ignored that rule.  It's thrown all kinds of mud -- drink driving allegations, boorish behaviour at a hockey game, skiving off from work in order to coach football, and just a few weeks ago, an accusation of groping a woman at a formal ball.

This has had two effects.  It's allowed Ford and his allies (mainly his younger brother Doug) to develop a carapace of scar tissue that's stood them in good stead in the face of these latest allegations.  And it's convinced a lot of Torontonians -- possibly as many as 40%, if you believe the opinion polls -- that the Star will stop at nothing in its campaign to get rid of Ford, a man whose opinions are about as far from the mushy leftism of the Star's editors and columnists as you could possibly get.  If the current allegations of crack cocaine use had been the first accusations made, Ford would have been out on his well-padded rear end long ago.  As things stand, unless the Star can actually produce the video that supposedly shows the Mayor inhaling from a glass pipe, Ford may yet be able to tough this out.

Ah yes, the famous video.  The folks who tried to sell it to the Star (and to Gawker) seem to have gone to ground, raising suspicions (not least at the Star) that maybe an associate of Ford's has bought the video and destroyed it.  That seems completely unrealistic.  These are not the tablets of the Decalogue we're talking about here.  It's 90 seconds of cellphone video footage. It seems inconceivable that the owners have not already backed it up, so if a Ford ally has in fact made an effort to buy it, I'd suggest he's wasting his time and money.

Then again.....these days people can't wait to post pictures of their most trivial actions on social media sites.  The fact that some kind of samizdat version of the video hasn't yet seen the light of day might just be evidence that it really doesn't exist, as Ford keeps claiming.  Unless, that is, crack cocaine dealers are a lot more disciplined than most of us would imagine.

It's a tawdry mess, and it's showing no signs of going away, although even the Toronto Star is starting to sound just a bit desperate about its inability to force the matter to a conclusion.  One amusing thought that occurred to me was that this whole thing might be an elaborate ruse cooked up by Ford to entrap the Star.  There's no way that's the case -- Ford is not that subtle -- but there are times when you almost think the paper would deserve it.