Toronto’s mayor has lost any pretense of integrity, said Rosie DiManno in the Toronto Star. Rob Ford has been exposed as “a liar, a fraud, and—possibly the least of his sins—an apparent smoker of crack cocaine.” Police have arrested his friend and sometime driver, Sandro Lisi, for alleged extortion in attempting to get hold of a video of Ford smoking something out of a crack pipe. When the Star and Gawker.com first reported on the video in the spring, Ford was snide and defensive. “Trashing the reputation of this newspaper and its reporters,” he insisted there was no such tape. Had he admitted his crime back then, perhaps he could have entered rehab and sought forgiveness. But that’s not Ford’s style. “He always denies, fabricates, smears everybody in the vicinity, and only belatedly comes quasi-clean when confronted with irrefutable evidence.” Now he stands revealed as “an unprincipled hypocrite.” Only after widespread calls for his resignation did he admit this week to smoking crack “in one of my drunken stupors,” adding, “I’m only human.”
I almost feel sorry for him, said Christie Blatchford in the National Post. “He really was always seen by the city’s governing class as a boob who didn’t belong.” Instead of a polished, articulate suit from the urban center, Ford is a crass high-school football coach from the suburbs, who spoke for the car-driving commuters rather than the tree-hugging public transport crowd. The progressives have long been slavering for any excuse to bring him down, and Ford has now given them an easy one by being a substance abuser. I’m not saying he was a victim, yet “I’m damned if I don’t sometimes see him that way.”
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