Rob Ford (again)

Edward Keenan has another good smashing of Toronto's embarrassment of a mayor, Rob Ford, in this week's Grid TO:

On his radio show this past weekend—in the leadup to a contentious casino proposal at City Hall—Mayor Rob Ford said he’d welcome a gambling palace in Toronto, and justified the decision on economic grounds: “We’re in desperate need of revenues,” he said. And just then, two years into his term in office—the halfway point to the next election—the last faint signs of life that had once animated the ideology you might call “Ford Notion” died out.

For if the mayor has been clear on one thing since the moment he started campaigning for the job, it’s that the city did not want for money. “There’s more than enough money,” he told radio host John Oakley in explaining a tax cut shortly after his election, followed by the familiar mantra: “We have a major spending problem at City Hall, not a revenue problem.”

Even back then, most people who had any familiarity with the reality of the city’s finances could tell he was wrong, or lying.

Ponder that for a moment. This is what I was talking about three posts ago. The political climate is getting heated because one side, the intelligent, reality-based, progressive side, is watching neoliberal scumbag politicians turn everything to shit while the neoliberal propaganda system indulges and reinforces the utter stupidity and ignorance of their chump voter base. In this case, it's shit-for-brains, serial liar Rob Ford gets elected saying he can trim (apparently $3 billion over 3 years!!!) of wasteful spending at city hall and not have to raise taxes or cut services ("guaranteed").

Turns out that was the utter nonsense progressives said it was. He proposed cutting library services, raising recreation centre fees, closing shelters for battered women, and slashing TTC services. Now it turns out, that in his lust to please his paymasters and get some lucrative wingnut welfare, by getting a casino in Toronto, he's actually saying the city is "in desperate need of revenues."

I'm sorry, but it's this sort of bullshit, and this sort of lack of accountability, that is driving progressives right around the fucking bend. Despite what the self-interested, contradictory blathering of Ford fuck-toys (like "Scarborough Dave" at the link), you don't get to be that wrong on something so relatively major, and get to get away with it.

But they do, don't they? Because unaccountable media hacks (Sue-Ann Levy, Margaret Wente, John Ibbitson, etc., etc.,) continue to appear in print (or on radio and television, which I don't listen to or watch) to lie, lie, lie, and give the impression (by their consequence-free lying and stupidity) that there's some legitimacy to shameless lying morons like Ford, or murderous cretins like Mike Harris, or gibbering Jesus-freak hypocrites like bush II, or anti-democratic psychopaths like stephen harper, as well as for the views of the closet-case/religious freak/racist/sexist/homophobic dunces who vote on their retrograde "values" and against their material self-interest. Their irrational hatred of the folks who are right all the time (progressives) is fostered by these media sleazemeisters.

The question is: What are we going to do about it?