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.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
The clown car cabinetOpinion Even 'Little Marco' towers above his fellow nominees
-
Ed Park's 6 favorite works about self reflection and human connectionFeature The Pulitzer Prize finalist recommends works by Jason Rekulak, Gillian Linden, and more
-
6 fantastic homes in Columbus, OhioFeature Featuring a 1915 redbrick Victorian in German Village and a modern farmhouse in Woodland Park
-
Malaysia: Hiding something or just incompetent?feature It is “painful to watch” how Malaysia has embarrassed itself before the world with its bungled response to the missing plane.
-
Tunisia: The only bloom of the Arab Spring
feature After years of “stormy discussions and intellectual tug-of-war,” Tunisia has emerged as a secular democracy.
-
Australia: It takes two to reconcile
feature To move beyond Australia’s colonialist past, we Aborigines must forgive.
-
Israel: Ariel Sharon’s ambiguous legacy
feature Ariel Sharon played a key role at every major crossroads Israel faced in his adult life.
-
South Africa: Trying to live up to Mandela
feature That South Africa was prepared for the death of Nelson Mandela is one of his greatest legacies.
-
China: Staking a claim to the air and the sea
feature China has declared an air defense identification zone over the East China Sea that includes a set of islands claimed by Japan.
-
China: Is our aid to the Philippines too meager?
feature China donated $100,000 to the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan, but later increased the amount to $1.6 million.
-
Philippines: A calamitous response to calamity
feature “Where is the food, where is the water? Where are the military collecting the dead?”