Watergate, Woodward, Bernstein and bullshit

Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of the break-in of the Democratic National Committee Headquarters at the Watergate office building. Dozens of Nixon staffers would be prosecuted and President Richard Nixon himself would be forced to resign and accept a presidential pardon from his successor, Gerald R. Ford.

In pardoning Nixon, Ford sacrificed his chance of being elected in his own right and relegated himself to being the only American president in history not be elected to the Executive Branch (having been appointed vice-president upon the resignation of Spiro Agnew.) In giving up something as consequential as the presidency in doing what he beileved was right, Ford might have been the last hero to hold the office.

Watergate changed history in several ways. Were it not for Watergate, Jimmy Carter almost certainly wouldn't have been elected president. In the absence of a Carter administration, it's difficult to imagine Ronald Reagan being elected. Without Reagan, conservatism wouldn't have taken the turn that it has and there might actually be a party that stands for balanced budgets in Washington, other than rhetorically.

Nixon often spoke privately about starting a third party (which I'll refer to hereafter as "The Nixon Party") from the White House. It would have been composed of moderate Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats. In Nixon's scenario, it's first presidential nominee would be John Connally, who he thought could have been elected in 1976. Connally was also Nixon's first choice to replace Agnew, but was convinced that he couldn't be confirmed by Congress.

Were it not for Watergate, the Nixon Party would have upended U.S politics. Never before had a third party been openly backed by the White House. Because President Nixon had built an unparalleled political organization, independent of the GOP, over his career ballot access likely wouldn't have been a problem and the public backing of an incumbent president that had just won 49 states and almost 61% of the popular vote would have been indispensable. With both the Democrats and Republicans split by the Nixon Party, it isn't at all hard to imagine Connally winning the presidency.

Of course, that all hinges on whether Richard Nixon was serious about starting a third party. As I'll address later, Nixon said any number of things that he didn't mean and never intended to be followed through on.

Much too much is made about the impact that Watergate and Nixon's resignation made on the presidency. Look at the the last ten years and ask yourself, "Does the presidency look any less imperial to you?"

George W, Bush circumvented acts of Congress with any number of signing statements (in fact, more than all of his predecessors combined) or the secret use of the Commander-in-Chief power that established a domestic wiretapping program in the National Security Agency that violated both the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment. Bush also wrote his very own stem-cell research law by executive order. This past Friday, Barack Obama essentially rewrote immigration law the same way.

Congress meekly re-asserted itself after Watergate, but Iran-Contra blew those reforms right out of the water. From Reagan forward, presidents have gotten ballsy to the point that they don't have to ask to bomb anyone anymore. The Watergate reforms pertaining to executive power lasted not even a decade.

But the biggest impact of Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon was on journalism. After All the President's Men, every semi-literate shitheel that was barely qualified for landscaping decided that they were gonna go to journalism school and bring down a president of their own. Which is how you wound up with a generation of people that were singualarly ignorant about history telling you that Watergate was singular in it's scope of evil, yet attaches the suffix "gate" to every scandal, no matter how inconsequential.

Everybody who knows how to spell their own name wants to be Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Unfortunately, not everyone has Woodward and Bernstein's story. And, as it happens, neither did Woodward and Bernstein.At least not completely.

Politics has nothing on journalism when it comes to arrogant self-justification, as we saw with "Woodstein's" incredibly self-congratulatory editorial in the Washington Post.

Forty years after the fact, no one can even agree about what Watergate even was, let alone what it actually meant. And because Americans are generally so proudly ignorant of their own history, they'll take as accepted wisdom what a couple of city desk reporters tell them it was.

My definition of Watergate is very strict and very simple. It is restricted to the initial break-in and the subsequent cover-up. And you know what? That's more than enough. The "smoking gun tape" of 17 June 1972 - five days after the break-in - which recorded Nixon ordering the CIA to interfere with the FBI's investigation was a clear obstruction of justice and therefore an impeachable offense which Nixon should have been removed from office for, had he not resigned first.

Woodstein's June 8 op-ed takes Watergate to the Theatre of the Ridiculous, including every objectionable, or even illegal, thing Richard Nixon did, and included it into the rubic of "Watergate" in a way that almost magnificently distorts history. Setting the tone for the liberal intelligentsia Watergate began not on June 17, 1972, but on January 20, 1969. From wiretapping staffers of the National Security Council suspected of leaking war secrets to various racist and anti-Semitic remarks, it's all Watergate, which is beyond silly.

Sillier still, Woodward and Bernstein imagine the scandal as not one, but five separate "wars." I'll have fun with each.

1. The war against the antiwar movement:

This argument is almost delusionally dishonest, in so far as it utterly ignores historical precedent (as do most of Woodstein's imagined Nixon "wars.")

Nixon’s first war was against the anti-Vietnam War movement. The president considered it subversive and thought it constrained his ability to prosecute the war in Southeast Asia on his terms. In 1970, he approved the top-secret Huston Plan, authorizing the CIA, the FBI and military intelligence units to intensify electronic surveillance of individuals identified as “domestic security threats.” The plan called for, among other things, intercepting mail and lifting restrictions on “surreptitious entry” — that is, break-ins or “black bag jobs.”

Thomas Charles Huston, the White House aide who devised the plan, informed Nixon that it was illegal, but the president approved it regardless. It was not formally rescinded until FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover objected — not on principle, but because he considered those types of activities the FBI’s turf. Undeterred, Nixon remained fixated on such operations.

You can't even argue that this was the genesis of Watergate. The Huston Plan - while violently illegal - only sought to expand the participation to other agencies of the FBI's already illegal activities.

If Nixon is guilty of a High Crime or Misdemeanor in the Huston Plan, it would be stupidity. Everything that the Huston Plan would have accomplished was already being done under COINTELPRO, which was first authorized during the Eisenhower administration. As a matter of fact, the Huston Plan was proposed a year before COINTELPRO was exposed. The Church Committee determined, after Nixon's resignation, that the CIA was unlawfully interfering with the anti-war movement before Nixon was sworn in as president.

COINTELPRO was already intercepting mail, as was the CIA, and "black bag jobs" had been carried out going back as far as the Wilson administration during the Palmer Raids. We also know that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, through Bobby Kennedy's orders, were wiretapping scores of American citizens without a court order, including Martin Luther King and some guy who was writing a book about Marilyn Monroe.

Anyone that knows anything about J. Edgar Hoover knows that the Huston Plan was already being carried out. Edgar just didn't want to share the spoils with the CIA and military intelligence. More importantly, he didn't want those operations controlled by anyone other than him.

Nixon's biggest mistake was that he brought all of these illegal activities into the White House, which took away the plausible deniability his predecessors enjoyed.

Woodward and Bernstein make much of Nixon's repeated orders to break into the Brookings Institution. Yet no action was ever taken on it. If one assumes a "criminal presidency", one would also assume that this order would be carried out.

However, Chief of Staff H.R Haldeman, Chief Domestic Policy Adviser John Ehrlichman and National Security Advisor (and later, Secretary of State) Henry Kissinger all have written that Nixon often gave orders that they knew to ignore. And they did. Regularly. The most persuasive evidence of this is that Brookings never actually was broken into.

Having said that, things took a decidedly darker turn when Nixon took the recently departed and superhero to the Christian Right, Charles Colson into his confidence. Whenever Nixon told Colson that something needed done, it got done.

Forty years later, no one knows who ordered the Watergate break-in  Because Nixon had everything he said during that period taped (and because it made no sense), we can be pretty sure that he didn't. But Colson is as good a suspect as any.

2. The war on the news media: Nixon's reaction to the Pentagon Papers was hardly new. Indeed, subsequent presidents have gone further. Ronald Reagan was convinced by Ed Meese and Bill Casey that Cabinet members should be regularly subjected to polygraph examinations because of leaks. It was only when Vice-President George Bush and Secretary of State George Schultz threatened to resign over it that President Reagan dropped the matter.

Woodward and Bernstein spent over half of this section going on about Nixon's anti-Semitic rages, never once noting that his fury over the leak was instigated by Henry Kissinger.

The Pentagon Papers were commissioned by Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Defense, Clark Clifford, as a study of where the Vietnam War went wrong. Therefore, they incriminated the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, not Nixon's. Nixon was intitally thrilled to have JFK and LBJ's dirty laundry spilled all over the front pages of the New York Times. Kissinger, however, was secretly negotiating the China opening and the SALT talks with the Soviets, and he knew that having U.S secrets out in the open could destroy both.

Why would you include four paragraphs of anti-Semitic quotes that had little or nothing to do with the press in a section on a war on the news media? Is someone suggesting that the media s controlled by Jews? If so, who?

My personal favorite part of this retarded section is the following;

“The press is your enemy,” Nixon explained five days later in a meeting with Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to another tape. “Enemies. Understand that? . . . Now, never act that way . . . give them a drink, you know, treat them nice, you just love it, you’re trying to be helpful. But don’t help the bastards. Ever. Because they’re trying to stick the knife right in our groin.”

We now know from independent historians and Nixon's own then-secret grand jury testimony that Moorer himself was spying on Nixon through Yeoman Charles Radford on Kissinger's NSC staff, which might go a long way in explaining Kissinger's reaction to the Pentagon Papers leak. Irony practically enveloped the Nixon White House.

3. The war against the DemocratsJohn Mitchell was never convicted of approving Gemstone, which Woodward and Bernstein never point out. But even if they take Magruder's word for it, there's still no evidence that Nixon approved it.

Nixon had the Oval Office, his Executive Office building office, all of his phones, and his vacation homes in California and Florida wired to tape recorders that recorded everything. Unlike FDR, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. Nixon's taping system was voice activated. Most of the principals on the tapes either didn't know, or had forgotten, that they were being taped. But there's still no direct evidence of presidential knowledge of either Gemstone or the Watergate break-in. And there are over 3,400 hours of those tapes.

Going to extremes to prove an already-thin case of a "war against the Democrats", Woodward and Bernstien pull out Donald Segretti. Segretti, unlike Nixon, wasn't even disbarred for his political shenanigans. He was the Republican Dick Tuck, the only difference being that no one knew what the Kennedy campaign was guilty of until decades after Kennedy took a bullet to the noggin. Of course, that's not to say that Tuck was involved in stealing the 1960 election in both Texas and Illinois, although that happened, too.

If you have to go down the ranks so far as Segretti to prove a "war", you essentially have no proof at all. It certainly doesn't rise to the level of the Kennedy and Johnson's misuse of the IRS to audit Republicans, including Nixon himself.

4. The war on justice: This is the hardest to argue against, in so far as Nixon actually was personally guilty of this. The "Smoking Gun" tape couldn't be clearer in his intention to obstruct justice. That itself was enough to warrant his removal from office, although President Clinton's directly and with foreknowledge lying to both a federal judge and a separate Grand Jury wasn't.

We know that between the August 1, 1972 tape where Nixon told Haldeman that "They (the Watergate burglars) have to be paid" and the March 21, 1973 conversation between Nixon and John Dean in which the President said that he knew where a million dollars of "hush money: could be gotten in cash that the burglars were indeed paid.

The "war on justice" is the only one in which Woodward and Bernstein make a clear and convincing case in their entire article.

Their last "war" is, far and away, the silliest of all.
5. The war on history: This is dishonest and best and retarded at worst. Moreover, it's hypocritical.

Woodstein make much of Nixon's denials of responsibility for Watergate, but there's nary a mention that Bill Clinton's legacy relies on the same assertion that "I made mistakes, but did not commit a crime." But both did, and there's evidence in both cases. With Nixon, there are the tapes. In Clinton's, DNA.

The fact is that most presidents are at war with history. Read almost any presidential memoir and you'll see just that. Reagan's and Clinton's come to mind most immediately. No one that I'm aware of thinks that Jack Kennedy would admit to being the Champion of Presidential Felonies had he have lived to write his.

The difference is the evidence. FDR, Kennedy and Johnson were very selective in what they recorded doing. Nixon, stupidly wasn't. He recorded everything, which, as he put it, "gave them a sword."

However, we now know about virtually all of the crimes committed by the United States government under the Wilson, Roosevelt. Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan and Clinton administrations. There have been several actions under the second Bush and Obama administrations that, while not openly criminal, are certainly impeachable.

Richard Nixon isn't the Gold Standard of Presidential Corruption because what he did was unique. Far from it. He has his place in infamy simply because he did what he did in a short period of time, because he was caught, and he was dumb enough to record it all.

But Nixon didn't lie directly to federal judge or a grand jury. Nor did he sell weapons to a terrorist state and give the spoils of those sales to another terrorist group, several time zones away. He also didn't order the wholesale wiretapping of the American people without warrant or the execution of U.S citizens absent due process of law. Those crimes occurred well after Watergate. And they continue to this day.

No, if there a war on history, it is being waged by the American people against themselves. If you don't hold your leaders accountable today, you shouldn't count on history doing it for you.

The party's over

I had the distinct pleasure of voting against Bob Rae twice when he was leader of the Ontario NDP. He was a socialist (albeit a very soft one) and I was not. I instead voted for Mike Harris' Progressive Conservatives in 1990 and '95 (and again in '99, those votes also turned out to be problematic for various reasons.) My loathing of the Liberal parties of both Ontario and Canada is world-renowned.

That being said, I do have a healthy respect for Mr. Rae. I do think that he's a decent and honourable man. More importantly, he recognized when he was wrong and sacrificed his political career in order to make it right.

As premier, Rae ran up a truly impressive debt, although nothing of the scope and size that Stephen Harper on Parliament Hill and Dalton McGuinty at Queen's Park have managed to create. It should be remembered that in 1990, we were in a fairly bad recession and Rae figured that he could spend his way out of it, which is precisely what Harper and McGuinty subsequently did and what federal Conservatives and anti-Rae Liberal partisans - some of whom also work for McGuinty -  now slam him for. After all, nobody said that intellectual honesty was required, or even desirable, in politics.

However, unlike Harper and McGuinty, Premier Rae attempted an economic course correction on the deficits he created that primarily impacted his own political base, the civil service unions. He knew that he was likely immolating his own career i doing so, but he went forward anyway because it was the right thing to do.

No one else in modern politics that I'm aware of has shown that kind of courage. After all, it's pretty easy for weapons-grade morons, like Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak or Tea Party shitheels like Scott Walker to take on public sector unions. For Rae it was political suicide and he did it anyway. I'd never actually vote for him, but he's earned my deep respect as a man of principle. If more politicians were willing to attack their own constituencies to reduce deficits, we wouldn't be as fucked as we are.

When both the federal and provincial NDP became too anti-Zionist for his liking, Rae publicly broke with them and joined the federal Liberals. Again, this was a matter of principle and not something that made his life any more comfortable. He could have just retired from public life entirely and devoted himself to making assloads of money in the private sector. Dippers despised him and far too many Liberal hacks described him as a "tourist."

Oddly enough, Bob stayed through the worst of it and the guy that those hacks supported, Michael Ignatieff, hasn't had anything to do with the party since.

Not only did the Liberal Party spend the last year doing a terrible wrong to Bob Rae, I'm pretty sure that they blew their own heads off in the process.

The Liberals love of situational ethics is storied, but never has it been so egregious as it has been over the last thirteen months. To explain, we have to go all the way back to the winter of 2008-'09, when Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff did their level best to make the Liberal Party of Canada virtually unelectable.

Dion had managed to throw away a perfectly good election that the Tories were actually born to lose. The Harper government had managed to piss away a healthy surplus that was left to them by Paul Martin, just as Lehman Brothers collapsed and the world started ending. Then Harper and his dickhead of a finance minister lied about there being a problem at all and suggested that it was an ideal time to get into the markets, which had lost half their value in a single day. If you followed Stephen Harper's financial planning advice, you'd be broke today because the markets continued bleeding money for months afterward.

Monsieur Dion took the reality of his loss the way only a Liberal can be expected to: He attempted a coalition coup with the NDP and supported by the treasonous Bloc Quebecois, which destroyed his leadership in less than a week. Michael Ignatieff was named interim leader by the party executive - none of whom are elected by the people -  who also expressly allowed him to run for the permanent leadership from that post.

I think we all know how well Ignatieff's leadership worked out. He managed to do something that Dion - or any other Liberal leader since William Lyon Mackenzie King -  couldn't pull off. He lost his own seat. And at least King twice lost his seat (in North York, Ontario and Prince Albert, Saskatchewan) while winning majority governments. Ignatieff did it as he lost over half of his party's seats. Ignatieff resigned as leader and fled to the safety his Yorkville condo before he could be butchered alive by his fellow Liberals.

The Liberal parliamentary caucus unanimously nominated Bob Rae as their leader. Unfortunately, the party's national executive board - which, again, hadn't been elected by the people -  remained staffed by Ignatieff flunkies that hated Rae for having the temerity for having twice challenged their guy for the leadership. They made him pledge that he wouldn't run for the permanent leadership if he was interim leader, thus denying Rae exactly the same situation that Ignatieff enjoyed and virtually nobody bitched about. If you want to know why I hate the Liberals so much, that's as good an example as any.

Of course, everybody knew that the fix was in and, when the terms of Ignatieff's devious scumbags expired, the reality of Bob Rae's pledge would change. But that didn't stop the anti-Rae faction of the party, who didn't at all object to the constant and conscious lying of Jean Chretien, Dion (who pledged that he would never enter into a coalition) and Ignatieff, from holding him to a politically engineered promise that was expressly designed to hobble him.

Here's the sleaziest thing of all. If Rae had refused to serve as interim leader, despite the unanimous nomination of the caucus, because he wanted to be permanent leader, he would have been shithammered by his detractors for that. These people are just pathologically dishonest. Once they get kicked out of politics forever, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them running professional boxing.

There's just no winning in that goddamed party, which is why I think that being a federal Liberal is a genetic defect, sort of like Down Syndrome. Or a physcriatric disorder, like self-mutilation. Liberals are like teenage girls who cut themselves because no one wants to be their boyfriend, but don't understand that guys are even more a-scared of cutters.

If those assholes would act like halfway normal human beings, they might actually be able to resurrect themselves enough to form a government someday. I believe that Bob Rae was the clearest shot they had of doing that, and his record in Ontario was a plus, rather than the minus that chronic shitheads think it is.

He's uniquely positioned to respond to Conservative attacks. All he need do is respond with an ad that says "Did Stephen Harper engage in wild spending during a recession, yes or no? Is Stephen Harper now targeting the civil service to contain the deficits he himself created, yes or no? Yes, Bob Rae did both, but he did so against his political interest rather than to further it."

Rae could have easily called the Tories on their own bullshit talking points and used his own experience to do it. There isn't another single Liberal that can do that. Not one. Does anyone think that someone named McGuinty can pull that trick off?

If you want an election about the character of the leaders, Bob Rae would've been the guy who was born to make Harper sweat. Why in the fuck do you think that the Tories launched an attack ad against an interim Liberal leader? Has that ever happened before?

Notice how a giant "Not a leader - Just visiting" campaign hasn't been fired at Thomas Muclair? Why do you think that is? But they did shoot one across Bob Rae's bow because I think that Harper was fucking spooked at facing Rae. And the Liberals, being galatically dumb, fell for it. Again.

The one guy who could've fought the Conservatives on their own ground was taken out today because the Grits are too scared and too stupid to do anything but count on The Next Big Thing.

Would Rae have become prime minister? Probably not. The kamikaze factions in the party (which is to say all of them) wouldn't allow it. To a person, Liberals hate each other with a much greater intensity than they hate even Stephen Harper.

But I do think that Bob Rae would at least hold what the Liberals have now, and maybe even pick up a few seats. He's the only Liberal with a record capable of bringing the fight against the Harper Tories. Rae could define the Tories just as easily as the Tories define him.

So what happens now?

Well, I suppose that Justin Trudeau has no other choice but to renege on his pledge not to run for the leadership, his family be damned. And every other biological loser in the party that knew that Rae was the prohibitive favorite is now free to get in, all of whom are going to concentrate their energies and resources on killing Trudeau, which I'm pretty sure they will.

My guess is that we're going to see a re-run of the 2006 leadership convention. Ignatieff, the last leadership candidate without a political resume to speak of, was the frontrunner until he wasn't. Having suffered a death by a thousand cuts during the campaign, Iggy couldn't win on the first ballot and lost on the fourth, giving the leadership to someone no one previously thought possible. And that long-shot was beaten before he even got the furniture into his new office.

There's an extreme long-shot chance that the Grits give the leadership to a Quebec pro, like Denis Coderre, who could at least build a party base for the future. But the Iggy faction will almost certainly kill him, too.

The difference between 2006 and now is that there was a Liberal Party left for Ignatieff to inherit three years later. Chances are that there won't be one for Justin to inherit three years from now.

The Liberal Party of Canada saw their Last Best Chance for Survival and they raped it to death. I really shouldn't be surprised that they did it, but I sort of am. They sure picked an odd time to stand on principle.

I hope that Bob retires from politics before he loses his seat. The vengeful incompetents in his own party won't be happy until he's disgraced and defeated once and for all and use that to prove that he could't win, despite whatever misfit they finally wind up with as their leader.  As a good and honourable public servant and a deeply honest man, he deserves better than that.

The party's over. It might be a few years before the autopsy is conducted, but they're done. With the political mugging of Bob Rae, the Liberals have created a perfect storm where no Liberal can win. They can't trust the caucus or the party executive anymore because they seem to be in conlflict with one another in the leadership wars. The entire infrastructure of the party is, at best, dyslexic and incapable of being rebuilt. At worst, they're committed to killing their own in favour of cheap stunts.

For the record, I should point out - yet again - that I'm not a Conservative Party voter, nor do I work for them, nor would I. I doubt that I can say that about some anti-Martin, Dion or Ignatieff Liberals. 

The last time I voted "Conservative" was for Joe Clark in 2000. Since 2000, I voted for the Progressive Canadian Party, the Greens and finally, the NDP in 2011 because I hoped to destroy the Liberals without voting for Stephen Harper.

I'd be thrilled to vote for a conservative party that doesn't insist on pissing away all of the fucking money on stupid shit. Unfortunately, the Libertarian Party doesn't run in my riding.

I'm terrified that without some competition, Harper will complete his life-long mission of turning the Conservative Party into the Liberals, a "natural governing party" that doesn't have to bother with being all that conservative. Frankly, I'd prefer the NDP, who are at least honest about wanting to ruin everything in their sight without caring about conservatism.  

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Ballad of the Teenage Jesus: Justin Trudeau and the Great Leap of Faith

Over the last week there's been much ado about whether or not Justin Trudeau, the scion of our Home and Native Land's deceased Sun King, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, will run for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. It could be considered a frenzy, if only because Canadians are an especially boring people.

And why wouldn't Canada be excited by the ascension to power by the offspring of a former leader? The United States did so well under the most recent incarnation of the House of Bush, did it not? If Justin wins he can always start a club with George W. and Bashar Assad, two other dynastic products that weren't as smart as their fathers.

Much has been made of young Justin over the last several months. He's pretty! He has a cool name! He has a hipster beard sometimes! He beat the shit out of a guy who smokes two packs a day! He has fabulous hair! He flirts with treason sometimes! He equates government ministers with feces on the floor of the House of Commons! He is, as a partisan a Grit as BigCityLib calls him, "Teenage Jesus"!

All of those things more than qualify Justin Trudeau to be a Hollywood star, but I'm not aware of them ever having qualified someone to run a major political party - or a modern industrialized nation - before. But here we are. When a murderous, unprincipled cyborg like Stephen Harper can be elected three times, I suppose that anything's possible.

I'm of the opinion that this shithead media-blogosphere tizzy is just that, a shithead media-blogosphere tizzy. If you pay enough attention to predictions that are made during the summertime news cycle, you very quickly notice that they rarely come true. For example, everyone in North America didn't wind up either getting fucked to death by Gary Condit or eaten by sharks, as was predicted in the summer of 2001. Instead, we wound up with Arabs riding jet liners into buildings, like Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove.

Justin has repeatedly said that he isn't going to be a candidate for the leadership, as he is unwilling to abandon his children for a cynical quest for power. And as inadvisable as taking the word of someone named Trudeau can be, I'm inclined to believe him. Not because of his kids, for chrissakes (every doomed politician uses his or her family as an excuse), but for several other good reasons, which I laid out for your friend and mine, the great Tiger on Politics, over the weekend. I thought that I'd also put them down here and expand upon them.

1) He’s got anger management issues to work on. Having him muse about becoming a traitor to his county every time he gets miffed at long-disproven "hidden agendas" or calling Cabinet ministers “a piece of shit” in the House is fine for a backbencher. However, it’s a lot more problematic for a party leader.

Christ, I don’t think that even Justin has ruled out the possibility that he could have an epic meltdown during the leadership debates, which would be fatal. If I were Rae, I’d be thinking of ways to goad the boy into a public tantrum even before he declares his intentions.

Trudeau's partisan-inspired comments regarding his possible sympathy for Quebec independence were a titanic fuck-up. And you only get one of those in politics, if you're lucky. Another outburst anywhere approaching that will kill him.

2) If he knows anything at all about his own party, he knows that he can’t play National Saviour while ensconced in never ending leadership wars unless he wins by a margin so unimaginably large as to silence his potential Bruti forever. And if he can’t play National Saviour, why bother?

Even If Trudeau were to win, the supporters of his rivals would do everything in their power to sabotage his leadership and election prospects. Such as it has always been. As Turner did to Pierre Trudeau, as Chretien did to Turner, as Martin did to Chretien, as Ignetieff did to Dion, and as Rae did to Igntieff, Rae and everybody else will do to Justin.

The Liberal leadership has been a poisoned chalice for much longer than most folks understand. The Grits have only won elections since 1975 because the opposition parties were either incompetent or divided. As we've seen over the last decade, that isn't the case anymore and the divisions within the LPC have rapidly destroyed them.

3) He’s fourteen years old and might like the idea of  having a future in politics. The ordinary rules don’t apply to people named Trudeau.If Justin runs and loses, his mystique – the only thing he’s really got going for him at present  – is ruined. A Trudeau loss would be devastating in ways that Bob Rae’s dual defeats weren’t. Rae is seen as being a credible manager. Justin Trudeau is looked upon, by Liberals dumb enough to do so, as a messiah.

Bob Rae, if nothing else, is a well-known and established commodity in politics. He's been on Parliament Hill or Queens Park since the 1970s. He's run more campaigns than all of the other party leaders - and Grit leadership aspirants - combined. If Bob runs for and loses the Liberal leadership for the third time, he'll retire peacefully, knowing that he's had a long and distinguished career.

Before running in Montreal - one of the very few places left in Canada where Liberals are still allowed to roam free - Justin's life experience consisted entirely of being a school teacher. He's run nothing larger than a classroom in his entire life. Not only has he not even been Minister of Hipster Beards, we don't even know if he was Class Clown in school.

This gives him the same resume problem that Micheal Ignatieff had, but Ignatieff could at least position himself as a "public intellectual" who had written some seventeen books that nobody has read. Iggy was the first Liberal leader to win the leadership without considerable political experience behind him in my lifetime. I just don't see the Grits going back to that well anytime soon, at least not if they intend to be taken seriously.

Oh, and for the enemies of Bob Rae out there, none of you bitched when Ignatieff ran for the permanent leadership from the interim leader's office.

If Trudeau runs and loses, he's done. Celebrity mystique is a fantastic thing if you win on your first try. If you don't, it dissipates so quickly that you may as well have never had it in the first place.

4) Beating Bob Rae is going to be very, very hard. Rae has the money, organization, momentum and political experience that give him a profound advantage in a hypothetical head-to-head with Trudeau. Bob also knows things abut public policy, caucus relations and campaigns that Justin can't be expected to.  These are all things that the Grits are going to need if they plan on having a life-expectancy of more than three years.

Giving the leadership to a pre-teen novelty would be every bit as desperate as it looks, by a party that needs to be seen as anything other than desperate. And the Liberals are nothing if not pragmatic. It might not have worked out the way they wanted, but there actually was a rationale for getting behind Dion and Ignatieff that there isn’t for Trudeau, other than his surname. Naming Trudeau as leader will be telegraphing to the other parties that the Liberals are officially out of tricks and are going for a Sarah Palin-style Hail Mary that's doomed to failure.

5) Given that I don't think he's not an utter mouth-breather, I’m pretty sure that Justin has considered the very real possibility that the Liberal Party only has one more election in it. What do you suppose that his formally presiding over the death of the Most Successful Party in the History of Democracy will do to the family legacy?

If dear old dad’s eternal term of office teaches us anything, it’s that the Trudeaus care a whole lot more about the family name than they do the Liberal Party. Pierre so hobbled his rival and successor, John Turner, that he essentially handed over the government to Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives in 1984. The elder Trudeau destroyed the party brand west of Manitoba and crippled it in Quebec. Were it not for the fracturing of the Mulroney coalition, Pierre likely would've been the last elected Liberal prime minister.

If Justin runs a general election in 2015 and the Liberals lose even more seats (which seems an entirely reasonable prospect at this point), the party is finished forever. And so too will be his political future, even though he'll only be not quite 44 years old.

6) Even a wildly unpopular Harper would disembowel Justin in public. But Stephen Harper isn’t going to be around forever, and all of his potential successors are laughable ward-heeling hacks or genetic fuckheads. The Tories have the shallowest bench imaginable. Always remember, a misfit like Vic Towes is in Cabinet because everyone else in caucus is actually worse.

It's hard to see a scenario where Trudeau beats Harper (assuming that Harper stays in the leadership for another election.) But – with a united Progressive Party behind him – seeing him lose to a bloated hack like Jason Kenney in 2019 strains the power of my imagination. And I’m a pretty imaginative cat.

Let's get one silly notion out of the way right now. There isn't going to be a great Progressive merger. The NDP are smart enough to understand that the Liberals are dead and that they only have to wait for them to fall down before eating the carcass. Even the Grits that favour a merger are still so impossibly arrogant as to think that they can dictate the terms of one, which they can't, having only slightly more than a third of the NDP's seats in Parliament and polling that consistently shows them a distant third in public preference.

Because the LPC's public support is so pathetic, they aren't going to have money or credible candidates in the next election. Donors are fickle and the desire to serve the public isn't necessarily the same as a masochistic need for public humiliation. That means that the few remaining Liberal bastions in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver are going to divvied up between the Tories and Dippers (with the Dippers probably getting the majority of them.)

Justin Trudeau is sufficiently left wing, and his celebrity strong enough, that he could win the leadership of a newly dominant NDP (or United Progressive Party, or whatever the fuck else they'd call it) after the final fall of the Liberals. Like Harper, Tom Muclair isn't going to be around forever, and he's already started bringing the NDP close enough to the middle that Trudeau could take it over when he's gone.

If Boy Justin focuses all of his energy on being the best constituent-service MP for the people of Papineau possible, raising shit-tons of money and quietly making nice with Dipper power players, he could probably survive the apocalypse. As the last national Liberal standing, he could bring together and lead a new Progressive movement. But he won't be able to do that as a failed Liberal leadership candidate or as the last fully discredited Liberal leader.

Justin Trudeau is a young man and the LPC is about as close to a political funeral as you can get. Being a pallbearer is no fun, but it sure as shit beats being the guy in the box. That being the case, he has a much better shot at running an NDP that swallows the remains of the Grits whole after the flood than he does being the Last Liberal Leader, so why not wait? Right now he has everything to lose and nothing to realistically gain.

Hey, how about we stay out of Syria?

If you've ever been curious as to when a proposed war is a really bad idea, consider the following. If people who can be reliably expected to oppose armed conflict in all of it's shapes and sizes find themselves in agreement with folks who think that there just aren't enough wars at any given time, that's as clear an indication as any that everyone has stopped thinking. And when people with lots of bombs stop thinking, no good ever comes of it.

That's pretty much what we're seeing today in regards to the continuing massacres of civilians in Syria. What's happening there is an outrage and affront to humanity's very dignity. And yes, Bashar al-Assad should be stuffed into an aluminium tube and dropped directly into Hell. I felt that way about his father when he bombed the city of Hama into rubble and paved it over.Those feelings are perfectly normal and, to be honest, I share them. The deliberate, wholesale slaughter of children by their own government is something not to be tolerated.

However, our being swept away by our emotions doesn't answer some fairly important questions, such as "Will foreign intervention make matters better or worse?" People as diverse as John McCain and everyone who opposed the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq are unified in not even asking that question, let alone answering it.

Those who suggest that our (and that raises the important question of who "we" are) intervention will makes things better are generally silent about precisely how that will happen. No one is suggesting a ground invasion and a march to Damascus to topple the human monument to cruelty that is the Assad regime. They're just saying that we should bomb the shit out of them and arm the insurgency. After all, it worked in Libya, right?

Actually, that remains to be seen. I'm almost certain that the overthrow last year of Gaddafi regime is going to have unanticipated blowback over the next generation or so.

First, we still - a year after the fact - have no idea who the new government of Libya is or what they represent. We still know very little about their commitment to democracy, human rights, or where their sympathies lie in regards to the struggle against Islamist extremism. It remains entirely possible that NATO created a monster worse than the one that we had.

Second, while Muammar Gaddafi was a son-of-a-bitch, he was increasingly our son-of-a-bitch. Like Assad, Gaddafi was willing to play ball when it came to sharing intelligence and torturing America's terror suspects through the rendition process.

And exactly where did that get Gaddafi? Well, it got him bombed, deposed and ultimately murdered. Co-operating with the United States didn't stop Omar al-Bashir of Sudan from getting indicted by the International Criminal Court, did it? At some point, despots are going to understand that getting along with the West isn't good for their health.

All things being equal, I'm fine with that. The United States would be far better off today if they didn't get into bed with these monsters in the first place. The fact that it did is one of the primary reasons that Islamist militants are presently at war with America.

If, however, you get into bed with monsters and don't follow your word to the letter, everybody is going to be less inclined to trust you. A singular argument by Republicans against Jimmy Carter was that he damaged U.S foreign policy by not giving safe haven to the Shah of Iran after he was such a faithful ally for so many years.

More importantly, we have a pretty good idea of what a U.S or NATO intervention in Syria would look like. As Fareed Zakaria points out, Syria is too small a country with too many people for the insurgents to retreat. Nor is there a single leadership faction behind it, which means even if they did manage to topple Assad, there's a better than even chance that they'd immediately go to war with one another, just as happened in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal. And that, one can assume, will kill more children than it saves.

Before I go further, I should point out that Syria is not unlike Iraq. A religious minority, the Alawites (an offshoot of the Shia), control the government and oppress the majority Sunnis. Remember what happened in Iraq when a domineering minority was overthrown? Who killed more kids, the American bombing or the sectarian war that followed?

What is now a low-level civil war in Syria is likely to explode if we get involved, and there will be no shortage of outsiders taking sides. If NATO acts to intervene on the side of the Sunni rebels, Russia, Iran and Iraq will  do everything they can to support their Alawite ally short of introducing their own ground forces, while Hezbollah will likely fight directly for them on the ground. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and the United States will support the Sunni  insurgency. The Chinese will likely arm the highest bidder, which one should expect to be Assad. And then there's the question of if intervention would create an al-Qaeda in Syria, paradoxically fighting on our side.

Absent NATO (and let's be serious about this, massive numbers of American) ground troops, an all-out civil war will ensue in Syria, dwarfing anything that we've seen in Iraq thus far. As Mr. Zakaria points out, Syria would rapidly look like Lebanon did in the 1980s. And always remember, Syria intervened in Lebanon for a reason. You might not like that reason, but there was a logic behind it.

Henry Kissinger wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post this past Friday which makes other prescient points. There is a decided absence of consensus, both in the United States and the international community, about yet another war in a Muslim country. And after the adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, it isn't clear that the American military has the resources to bring a Syrian conflict to a conclusion that isn't far worse than it is now.

A full-scale civil war might not necessarily result in more babies being shot in the head at point-blank range, but it almost certainly will result in mass starvation of those babies and a refugee nightmare for the countries surrounding Syria. Where will those people flee to? Iraq? Lebanon? Turkey? Israel? Can they all go to the summer cottages of those calling for intervention in the first place? They might like being near a cool lake. But only on the weekends that you're not there, of course.

I don't want to minimize the horror of what happened in Houla. But I also refuse pretend that it's as simple as   "confront (ing) the meanness in this world", which is a simplistic and silly view of the world. And to suggest that anyone who prefers to think long and hard before making things worse is trafficking in "chronic misanthropic indifference" is nothing more than cheap propaganda, counter-productive, and likely to kill more innocent Syrian babies if it's even halfway successful, rather than less.

What some people on both sides of the political spectrum don't get is that war shouldn't be about talking points, particularly on the left, which spent the last decade decrying exactly that.

But if you have a head for selective war, may I suggest the following: Start campaigning for a military draft in all of the NATO countries. Asking American volunteers to get dead over the last line of a Bruce Springsteen song is pretty easy when you and your kids have no skin in the game. When you're willing to sacrifice the lives of your children in a mission that will almost certainly kill more Syrian children than it saves, you might be worthy of being taken seriously on foreign and military affairs.

If fighting universal evil in the world is the new raison d'etre of the Left and the Neocon Right, then maybe it's time you start dressing up your kids and teach them to march because there all kinds of it out there. If and when you're prepared to do that, I also expect you to stop the constant fucking whining about tax increases and domestic spending cuts that war demands.

War is a serious fucking business. And it if you ultimately want less of it, it should start being treated as such. If you want to go to war, Iraq and Afghanistan should have taught you one thing. You need need to expect to spend a lot more in blood and treasure than the "experts" say you will and you need to sacrifice something,

Nothing was more frustrating to me - and I've spent eight years saying this - than Republicans proclaiming that Islamic terrorism was a threat to the American way of life and that all that 99.5% of the population had to do to support "freedom" was enjoy their tax cuts and go shopping.

If progressives start picking up this mantra, we're all doomed as a society. Between them, there will be no end to wars that accomplish their stated ends, and no end to the debt they accumulate.

Unless war starts meaning something other than a partisan talking point, we're fucked.

Let's get the Catholic Church off of welfare

I've explained my history with the Catholic Church before. I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic schools for eleven years. However, when it came time for my confirmation, I realized that there wasn't a single major issue that I agreed with the Church on, so I declined formal membership into "the club."

I generally support the death penalty (except in Canada, for constitutional reasons involving double jeopardy and the government's ability to appeal a jury acquittal) and I think that abortion is adorable. I don't oppose war for it's own sake, even some aggressive wars. Any number of folks like to tell me that the Church doesn't necessarily stand against all war, but they can't cite one that the Holy See hasn't opposed in the last seventy years. I think that charity is a marvelous thing, but when it becomes a duty, it stops being charity. I also believe that government should be awfully careful when committing itself to the charity business.

I disagreed with the Church up and down the line, so I stopped being a Catholic when I was twelve years old. In my mind, that makes me more intellectually honest than the vast majority of Catholics, conservative and liberal alike, both of whom feel that the Church is "misguided" about 50% of its agenda at any given time.

That attitude is as sanctimonious as hell. You know what? They can't be misguided, you assholes! It's their fucking club. If you don't like their rules, get out of their treehouse. Sometimes life really can be as simple as that.

I'm of the mind that the Church is way too stingy about excommunicating fairweather Catholics. If it were my treehouse, Catholic law would be exactly that. Therefore, if you use birth control, get a divorce or an abortion, sit on jury that hands down a capital sentence, or volunteer for an "unjust war" (which, according to Church dogma, is most of them), out you'd go. Religion, after all, is the least democratic construct imaginable. No one has ever suggested that you get to outvote the Word of God.

But because the Church is way down on my list of things that I give a shit about, I'm generally supportive of their right to be wrong about everything. Even the tax exemption for the Church and its subsidiary institutions and charities doesn't bother me that much, even though I think that neither should exist. The Church obviously wants to play politics, so they can pay the entrance fee. I'm also of the belief that charity isn't charity when it is subsidized by the rest of society through the tax code. For that reason, I have never deducted charitable giving through on my taxes. The gifts that I give, however small, are 100% mine.

All things being equal, I try really hard not to think of my former church all that much.

Having said that, the Church has gone out of my way over the last few months to get my attention, both in the United States and here in Ontario, and that's what I'd like to discuss with you today.

Because of a constitutional quirk in the British North America Act of 1867, Catholic schools that want it receive public funding. Prior to 1984 that funding only went through grade 10 in Ontario. Afterwards the system was fully funded through what was then grade 13. The Catholic system is alone among religious schools in receiving public funds here. You'll see why that's important in a minute.

The genetically wrong and quite likely corrupt Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty recently decided that Catholic schools must be forced to accept something called "Gay-Straight Alliances," irrespective of their religious beliefs.

First, the Church's teachings awfully selective. You find almost no references to homosexuality in the New Testament. What you find about them is almost exclusively in the Old Testament, right alongside demented prohibitions against shellfish and tattoos (which immediately follows the queer stuff in Leviticus) and some truly fascinating divorce procedures. If and when religious folks ban their adherents from tattoo parlors and Red Lobster, I'll start taking their feelings about gay people seriously.

On the other hand, schools have sucked for years and are only getting worse. Each new generation is more awesomely fucking stupid than the last. If schools start focusing more on "the three r's" and less on social engineering (on both ends of the political spectrum,) they might finally stop being little more than retard factories. And that's especially true of sex education. The only people I trust less to teach anyone about fucking than the government is an institution that has an antiquated vow of chastity.

As much as I might personally sympathize with the motivations behind the gay-straight alliances, I'm not sure that schools are the proper forum for them, particularly by government diktat. As soon as those little bastards can read Dickens, show me where Pakistan is on an unmarked map or do my goddamned taxes without my winding up in prison, I might feel differently.

So far as "anti-bullying" measures go, most of the things that constitute bullying are already against the law or are in clear violation of existing school policies and definately actionable in civil courts. The question is - as it usually is - one of enforcement. I'm always suspicious when government takes further measures against things that are already criminal or creates drastic civil exposure. Usually, it constitutes nothing more than grandstanding by scumbag politicians of every stripe. For that reason, I rarely credit political types with good faith. And I'm never disappointed as a result.

It seems that the Catholic school boards object to the term "gay-straight alliance" more than anything else, but McGuinty is forcing them to accept it. Amazingly, no one is objecting all that strongly to the school boards' restrictions on the speech rights of their students. But again, it's hard to justify school time and resources being dedicated to non-academic activities (which I would extend to sports, clubs and other purely social functions, like dances and whatnot.) If students feel strongly enough about the issue, they can organize on their own time and call themselves whatever they want without the interference of the Church or the state.

Then there's the outrage and litigation against the Obama administration's insurance mandate for contraception. The Church itself is exempt, but their subsidiary institutions (schools, charities and hospitals) are not. So of course Catholics and sycophantic Republican shitheads are howling about "a war on religious liberty and the First Amendment."

Their argument is problematic in that most of the institutions at issue receive public funding in one way or another, either through direct subsidies, tax exemptions, grants or student loan programs. They're all on the dole to varying degrees and none of them have suggested that their faith is so strong that they're willing to forgo that funding to uphold it. They'd rather keep the money, sue, and become Republicans or members of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario.

I'm amazed that the people who can't contain their outrage about gay-straight alliances and contraception mandates are almost always the very people who support drug testing welfare recipients. Those tests are in violation of the Fourth Amendment and individual privacy rights but, as Republicans and Conservative Party members will tell you, you sacrifice certain rights the second you take government money. They aren't wrong either. Private businesses accept all manner of restrictions and mandates when they receive public contracts.

As a matter of simple intellectual consistency, you can't support one government intrusion on liberty when public funding is involved and oppose the other. As a matter of constitutional theory, all rights are created equal. One person's right to the free exercise of religion is no more special than another's right to be free of unreasonable searches, except upon issuance of a warrant. And the reverse is also true. Liberty rights are liberty rights. You can't logically or realistically demand that the state infringe one one, yet insist that another is off-limits.

Of course, forgoing public subsidies probably wouldn't be the end of the matter. The government has the legal right to be involved in educational curriculum, even of home schooled children. And regardless of which party controls the White House and Congress next year, the American government is going to be a whole lot more involved in the health insurance industry.

However, Catholics would have a much stronger argument if they didn't insist on being paid pipers who play their own tune.

Conservatism and me, part three: Foreign policy and war

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The continuing disaster of Rob Ford

Some of my snarkier commenters like to remind me that I predicted that Rob Ford would lose the 2010 mayor's race, which I spent the better part of a year doing. In large part, I do so because Toronto is a fundamentally liberal city and, even during the last weekend of the campaign, the polls were showing upwards of 25% of the vote being undecided, which is unheard of. But I do cop to being wrong.

What those commenters don't like to admit is that everything else I predicted has actually come to pass. Candidate Ford's fantastical notion that half of City Council would vote itself out of existence was never again mentioned after election night. The central plank of his electoral platform, building tens of billions of dollars of subways with no plausible way of paying for them, has led to repeated humiliations at the hands of both Council and Queen's Park.

I also said that, if elected, Ford would do unspeakable damage to conservatism in this city. You have to remember that Etobicoke Slim is a guy who inherited wealth and a political machine and all he ever did on Council was flout that wealth and vote "no" a lot. These are things that pretty much anyone could do, if given the opportunity.

Unlike Mel Lastman, who also drove me nuts for the better part of my life, Ford never had a set of ideas or a philosophy with which he could govern. Instead, he harnessed populist outrage at the foibles of the far left during the Miller years. But his platform was every bit as implausible as the Left's was, promising to take cuts to things like gardening at City Hall and magically turn it into untold billions in new spending, which turned out to be an almost majestic lie. When Hizzoner subsequently tried taking an axe to popular social services, he was defeated by Council and his approval went into the toilet.

Since then, both Prime Minister Harper and Ontario Conservative leader Tim Hudak have given the mayor and his ridiculous "Ford Nation" a wide berth, fearing that his unpopularity might actually be contagious. Despite very promising early polls, the provincial Tories were shut out in Toronto, in part because Hudak is the dumbest motherfucker on earth, but also in reaction to Ford's drag on the party.

If the Left can get their shit together enough to run a single candidate against Ford in the next election, I believe that he'll lose in a pretty impressive way. Worse, he'll be an albatross around the neck of the conservative movement for a generation. And don't believe for a second that I'm the only one saying that. It's becoming a pretty regular (albeit off the record) refrain from the serious players in the conservative establishment here. Not only are Harper and Hudak keeping their distance, so are the heavy hitters from the Harris, Mulroney and Davis years.

Then there's the not inconsiderable matter of the mayor's personality. At best, he's a blowhard. At worst, he's a potentially violent retard. Neither of these traits were a secret from the electorate before the campaign, and neither have been mitigated by power and responsibility. Toronto police have been dispatched to his home on several occasions, often - but not always - due to his inability to get along with his wife.

Which brings me to what happened Wednesday night. Just when you think that Rob Ford's life and mayoralty can't get more bizarre, he surprises you. You've got to at least give him that. It's a gift.

Against my better instincts, I try to give folks the benefit of the doubt. However, I'm also of the conservative opinion that your credibility diminishes with each visit you make to the back of a police cruiser. And my mayor has had more adverse contact with the constabulary than even Paul Bernardo, who was only placed in custody once. As it is, he's a few music lessons shy of qualifying for the original lineup of Guns N' Roses. If you ever wondered what it would be like to be governed by Axl Rose, look no further than Toronto.

Furthermore, Ford's story keeps changing. He now says that he wants to buy the land so his children have a (considerably) larger play area, but his application to the city focuses on the need for a security fence. So far as I know, no previous mayor has requested public land for either. Ford initially denied that he approached Dale with a raised fist, bit now says that he wasn't sure whether he was going to hit him or not. He also now concedes that his fist "could have" been cocked and ready to strike.

Both the mayor and his public relations disaster of a brother say that they have home security footage of the incident, but won't release it to the public. This begs the question, "Why not?" If that footage completely exonerates the mayor, why not release it, especially since it would have the added benefit of deeply embarrassing his mortal enemies at The Toronto Star? The Ford family's refusal to put the video out there can lead a reasonable person to conclude that they're telling less than the whole truth.

The tape is going to come out anyway. Ford didn't make many friends on the force when he tried to strongarm their budget last year, and embarrassing things do tend to leak from police headquarters when that happens. Unfortunately, the mayor no longer has the opportunity to ask Jack Layton how that works.

Ford's supporters are having a field day pretending that Daniel Dale is a paparazzo at best, and a pervert at worst. Of course, they ignore entirely that he won a National Newspaper Award just last week, which tends to suggest that he's neither. Dale has no history of publicly immolating himself, yet Rob Ford does. Ford Nation also seems to think that Hizzoner's request of public land for private use isn't something worthy of consideration, although I suspect they'd feel differently if a dirty hippie like David Miller tried it.

On the other hand, this latest fiasco allows the Fords to do what modern conservatives love doing most, running against the media and whining about their own supposed victimhood.

Conservatives have been running against the Star for at least a generation, and it actually has a pretty good success rate, provided you don't actually live in Toronto. But the mayor is taking this to a new, silly and potentially ruinous level. Ford went to work yesterday demanding that the Star remove Dale from City Hall, which he knows they can't do while maintaining any self-respect. Now he's gone even further, saying that he won't talk to the media at all if anyone from the Star is in the vicinity.

That goes a long way in proving my long-held contention that Mayor Rob Ford might actually be retarded or suffered one football-related head injury too many. He obviously wasn't paying attention to how well it worked out when the Obama administration tried to cut Fox News out a couple of years ago. The White House Press Corps rallied around Fox and the Obama people had to relent in a truly humiliating way.

There's no reason to believe that the Toronto media won't do exactly the same thing on behalf of the Star. Even Ford-supporting outlets like the Sun know that a future lefty mayor might try to blackball them and the support of the commies at the Star could come in handy if that comes to pass. What Rob and Doug Ford are too deranged and dumb to understand is that the media has interests that transcend ideology or partisanship. For supposed businessmen, they don't seem to understand business very well.

Here's one of life's dirty little secrets, teenagers. Politicians need the press a whole lot more than the press needs politicians. The media can just as easily chase Lindsay Lohan around, all the while having more fun and probably making more money. But without the mass media, politicians have no way of getting their message out beyond their own true believers. Ford's is a piddling little piss-puddle of a childish threat, and precisely what this city has come to expect from him.

Rob Ford's entire agenda is now being regularly shithammered into hell by City Council and he seemingly can't leave the office without finding some new and novel way of embarrassing both himself and the city. The best part? We're barely 18 months into his term.

The sad thing is that it's going to be almost impossible to elect a halfway serious conservative in this city in his disastrous wake.