If you've read this space for any length of time, you know that I've hated Ford for years. During last year's campaign, I argued that he was singularly unqualified to run this city and that he would be an unmitigated disaster for conservatism, if only because he isn't especially conservative. He's more of a self-aggrandizing blowhard and a drunken idiot than anything else.
During his decade on City Council, Rob didn't do much of anything other than vote no a lot and make a Coors Lite-fuelled spectacle of himself regularly, which is something that I can do. Being something of an elitist, I always endeavour to vote for people that are smarter than I am, which is significantly harder than you would think it is. The mayor has never built or done anything in his life. His money, his business and his original political base were all inheritances from his Daddy. The guy was environmentally conditioned to be a monumental shithead.
More importantly, his entire election platform was built on a shockingly transparent set of lies. He vowed to withdraw from a fully-funded public transit plan called Transit City, but would expand subway infrastructure using only magic. Actually, that's not entirely true. Ford thought that the deficit-laden federal and provincial governments would give him metric shit-tons of money by virtue of the fact that Ford is a confrontational prick and a borderline retard. And private business would finance the rest, despite the fact that the very same notion proved to be a spectacular failure on the original Sheppard subway line, a decade ago.
Rob further promised to do away with all manner of revenue to the city without cutting services. As a matter of fact, he specifically said that he would expand services where needed. This would be accomplished by cutting things like gardening at Nathan Phillips Square and the hallucination that career politicians would vote themselves into oblivion by reducing the size of Council by 50%.
I spent the better part of a year pointing out that Hizzoner's policy positions were silly and that his math didn't work. Moreover, his plan was based on such a fantastical notion of how politics works that even toddlers shook their heads at it once it was explained to them. Among other things, I said that supporting Ford was an act of willful ignorance, and perhaps evidence of a particularly worrisome extra chromosome.
But it sure as fuck wasn't an expression of actual conservatism. It used to be that conservatism was implacably opposed to things like lying, stupidity and creative math, all of which were liberal creations. In the Tea Party age, all three are campaign strategies, as evidenced by the rise of Rob Ford.
Most of my commenters during the campaign were either as cosmically ignorant of the laws of both both politics and mathematics as Ford himself is, or they acknowledged that he was lying, but it ultimately wouldn't matter. The voters were of a similar mind, and Boy Rob won with a margin that seemed to surprise even him. It sure surprised me.
Being the fan of reality that I am, I decided to sit back and watch the debacle unfold. I may have placed too much faith in the chronically self-interested and genetically defective electorate of this city, but I do understand how politics and, more importantly, math works.
The brothers Ford thought that they could score some easy points a couple of months ago by engaging liberal has-beens like Margaret Attwood over irrelevant issues like library funding. But times have changed and the math hasn't. So now we're looking at pretty dramatic cuts to things like cops, firefighters and the public transit that Ford promised to expand. And the same silly fuckers that supported Ford and putting on their outrage helmets.
One of the biggest polls ever conducted in Toronto shows residents from every corner of the city are overwhelmingly against Mayor Rob Ford’s cuts.
From Doug Ford’s ward in Etobicoke to budget chief Mike Del Grande’s in Scarborough, the results will serve as a sobering warning to councillors within the Ford voting bloc.
A Forum Research telephone survey of nearly 13,000 people reveals that more than three-quarters of Torontonians want their local councillor to protect services rather than comply with the mayor’s wishes. And only 27 per cent of residents say they would vote for Rob Ford if an election was held tomorrow.
More significantly, because of the poll’s size, Forum was able to provide the first authoritative assessment of support on a ward-by-ward level.
Forum’s poll, which was paid for by CUPE Local 79, one of two major unions at city hall, questioned 12,848 Toronto residents on Tuesday using a random dial, push-button response, phoning system. The margin of error is plus or minus 0.9 per cent, 19 out 20 times.Say what you will about the poll being paid for by opportunistic union hacks, but the sample size is stellar and you almost never see a margin of error like that. I don't see a professional polling firm putting itself out of business just for a quick paycheck from some Gambino Family-connected librarians. These are serious numbers that should be taken awfully fucking seriously.
Most importantly, the revolt is coming from the parts of the city that were the more vehement for Ford just 11 months ago. The numbers from wards like mine, which went heavily for Ford, are staggering and impossible to ignore. Once Hizzoner loses suburban councillors, he's done..
That fat asshole's political base has dropped out from under him. Right-leaning councillors now have the choice of either tying themselves to the fucking Titanic, or representing the wishes of their own constituents. If I know anything at all about politics, we're about to see the mayor reduced to irrelevancy by his own allies. The much-ballyhooed "gravy train" is getting ready to run right over that stupid motherfucker.
Here's the thing. I don't care all that much about service cuts. But the fact remains that Rob Ford went out of his way to specifically promise that they wouldn't occur. More importantly, his entire campaign was predicated on just how bad the municipal budget imbalance was, so he can't realistically hide behind the notion that the numbers were a surprise to him.
The fact is that he was lying, and most semi-reasonable and literate people should have known that. If this were a truly just and equitable world, the wards that supported Ford the hardest - like mine - would feel the goddamned axe most viciously. But I think we know that isn't going to happen, don't we? The coloureds along the Finch West and Eglinton West corridors are going to get hammerfucked directly into hell, while folks like me are going to get by. They already wait 9 hours for a packed and smelly cattle-car of a bus that seems more like it's going to Auschwitz than Yonge Street, so what difference is an extra twenty minutes going to make?
No sane person thinks that Ford is going to annihilate the downtown wards that opposed him the strongest are going to get hurt, either. Shit, the Ford boys want to give those Marxist dickheads more fucking condominiums and lakeshore shopping malls that no one wants to pay for. For chissakes, all the bankers, lawyers and real estate agent cocksuckers live there! And the chances that Rob Ford is going alienate them are about the same as my getting gangbanged by the cast of the new Charlie's Angels.
This isn't a local phenomenon, either. Ontario has a provincial election next month, and Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak, who had a double-digit lead just six weeks ago, is poised to have his ass handed to him by Liberal Dalton McGuinty, who has only ever been popular with shitheels and pederasts. And even shitheels and pederasts don't like McGuinty all that much. They just like him a lot more than they do Hudak.
Let's look south of the border for a minute if you're not convinced. Take a look at the Tea Party candidates that actually got elected to positions of adult responsibility, as opposed to the politically laughable MILF brigade of Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin. As I write this, Governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin, John Kasich of Ohio, and Rick Scott in Florida are all polling behind church burnings. Sure, you could argue that they're only polling slightly behind church burnings, but you you can't ignore the fact that the numbers are upside-down in a big, bad way.
Even weapons-grade morons like Rick Perry aren't immune. Perry took steps to inoculate young girls from an entirely preventable cancer and large segments of the modern right are painting him as a straight Michael Jackson, whimsically dispensing "fuck drugs" to pubescent girls, presumably because he enjoys kidfucking. And that's when they're not running against other applied sciences, like evolution. It's also important to remember that this is the same Rick Perry that was actually applauded when he said that he "didn't lose sleep" over the possibility of executing an innocent person, mostly because he already has.
And they're not necessarily wrong in running their campaigns like that.. If I had their economic policies, I'd want to distract everyone from them by running against Darwin and for cervical cancer as much as I possibly could. The only halfway coherent plan out there is Paul Ryan's, which immediately increases the deficits that Republicans are running against in a huge way, and might balance the budget in thirty years, which just happens to be about twenty-five years too late for it to do any good.
The goddamned Birchers, with their celebrated hatred of fluoride and all, are welcomed as fellow travelers of the modern Right, while someone like John Huntsman - who was elected as governor of fucking Utah, hardly a coffee clatch for the AFL-CIO and ACLU - isn't. That, my friends, isn't a ship that can keep the water out for very long.
The only thing that has allowed these people to get as far as they have is the fact that liberals are liberals. As such, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. If they were even halfway smart, they'd do what Bill Clinton did, which was steal issues from the right and address them in a way that's acceptable to the general electorate. At that point, it's pretty easy to paint your enemies as extremist assholes.
But even that's beyond the ability of most of the left. Dalton McGuinty is the exception in that he's blessed with ineffective and retarded enemies, much like Stephen Harper has been. The important difference is that, since becoming prime minister, Harper has essentially governed as a Liberal and faced an impossibly divided opposition. Accordingly, there are no lessons to be drawn from his experience.
That isn't always going to true, folks. At some point - in the very near future, I suspect, we're going to be steamrolled by our stupidity. And the long-term prospects of recovery aren't going to be good. Say what you will about Herbert Hoover, but he didn't spend the Depression yelling about teen fucking, The Origin of the Species, and imagining magical subways as the country was in mortal peril. And we are.
Not only are we fucked. We deserve to be.
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