No answers to questions about your recovery plan, Mr. Mayor? You want us to respect your family’s privacy? The way you did when you told the world in a scrum that you were getting enough to eat at home?
Driven by the full brain-rot of reality TV, infomercial journalism and a democracy facing the abyss, we have entered the era of ROFO madness.
‘Reefer madness‘ is when you smoke marijuana and lose your mind, usually after the first puff. You die at a young age, always in some form of degrading slavery — or you start making dubious statements about China.
ROFO madness is when you smoke crack cocaine and show up in videos making death threats. Your mother blames it on your weight problem. Then you sell bobblehead dolls of yourself to people lining up to have their picture taken with you.
As with business and government, and news and entertainment, notoriety and celebrity have merged. And there are always cheerleaders in the media — no matter how many times you pull your pants down in public.
Politicians these days — to the great amusement of the vegetable-heads out there in the Big Garden — couldn’t feel shame if they were caught sucking the formula out of the baby’s bottle. Since news morphed into entertainment, content became a drag and only the outrageous will do — so our elected officials have fully embraced ROFO madness.
Look what Anthony Weiner did to that old stand-by, the political mailer. He ‘sexted’ his junk. Some liked his little innovation, others didn’t. But that didn’t stop the creator of weiner-mail from trying a political comeback. Shameless, he pursued his run for mayor of New York to the bitter end, right to the last flip of the bird to the media.
While under investigation for election fraud, Dean Del Mastro remained Stephen Harper’s parliamentary secretary, adding $15 grand to his paycheque. Just to prove he has a sense of humour, the PM used him as his attack dog on the robocalls file. Delicious, yes? DD lecturing the opposition benches on electoral ethics and scurrilous charges.
It proved too much even for the man in black. When Del Mastro was charged by Elections Canada, but swaddled still in the presumption of innocence, he was flicked from the PM’s shoe like a wad of Double-Bubble.
Getting charged isn’t what it used to be. When Ottawa Mayor Larry O’Brien, a Tory, was charged with offering a bribe to another candidate in an election, he saw no reason why he couldn’t conduct his legal defence and run the city at the same time. As things turned out, he was acquitted.
Charged with fraud for allegedly using public funds to pay for his son’s wedding reception, London Mayor Joe Fontana, a Liberal, never saw the need to resign. He is about to have his day in court. No one resigns these days, no matter what they’re charged with. Even when they do, we put them on reality TV shows; remember former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich?
What have our pols become? Shameless. Three Canadian senators who, so far, have been convicted of nothing except pissing off the Top Banana have now joined that 7 per cent of their fellow citizens with a fair bit of spare time on their hands.
The accusers of suspended senators Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau ignored exculpatory evidence, invented a new charge, and pronounced sentence without a trial in a decision that can’t be appealed. Even in Russia — where they put dead people on trial — that would be shameless.
But there’s only one Sultan of Shameless: ROFO. Mayor Rob Ford starred in a video smoking crack cocaine with guys who routinely shoot each other in the course of doing business.
Then, in another home movie, he ranted about poking someone’s eyes out, as well as making a few other alterations to their anatomy. The other people in the room must have had their spittle-proof vests on. Has anyone ever asked who the poor guy was, if he still has both eyes, if he’s sleeping with the fishes? For that, we’ll have to wait for the results of the top secret police investigation, Brazen 2, a spinoff of Project Traveller.
Newly released information raises serious questions. On March 28, 2013 Anthony Smith was shot dead outside the Loki Lounge on King Street West. Smith was one of three people who posed in the crack video with Rob Ford. Previously redacted information from a 500-page search warrant reveals that police were looking into the possibility that the crack video was on a cellphone belonging to Smith that might have been stolen at the time of his murder.
Yesterday at Toronto City Hall, you could close your eyes and think you were in Vegas dive. CBC reporters were giggling like teenagers at their first edgy party with real Bad Boys. Doug Ford popped off like an extra from Goodfellas. For a moment, it looked like things were heading to the parking lot.
The coverage has been as weird as the spectacle itself. The sight of Ford’s homicidal fit got Rex Murphy’s compassion glands pumping. The mayor’s death threat video was an early Christmas present for Ford-haters, he wrote.
Rob Ford, champion of the little guy, the Gandhi of suburbia. I trust Rex already has his bobble-head.
After watching the video of ROFO’S chilling Chernobyl, Christie Blatchford thought the story was about how low journalism had sunk. (The Star, you see, paid five large for Rob’s torrent of malevolence.)
A new low? Please. Back in 1966, Robert Reguly paid $1,000 to Gerda Munsinger, the alleged spy and party girl who was rocking the world of cabinet minister Pierre Sevigny — and had every newspaper in Toronto hauling their chequebooks out.
Christie might also remember the Toronto Sun paid $10,000 for Paul Bernardo’s wedding album.
The CBC’s Fifth Estate paid $3,700 to a mafioso turned police informant to describe on television how organized crime works. He should have known; he admitted to killing someone. His payment was defended as a justifiable production expense by the Corporation.
In the U.K., the wife of the Yorkshire Ripper, Rosemary Sutcliffe, was offered more than $200,000 for an interview.
And I’m sure Christie and everyone else remembers the cash haul of the Watergate crew — $100,000 for the H.R. Haldeman interview, $15,000 for the chat with Gordon Liddy, and a whopping $600,000 for Tricky Dick himself to participate in the famous David Frost interviews.
No, a newspaper or TV network buying information is not new. Nor is the story here about the media piling on poor Rob Ford for just being a regular guy, as his enablers would have people believe.
You know what’s really new? Seeing the mayor of Canada’s biggest city on video begging for fifteen minutes to kill someone — you know, murder in the first degree, until the guy was really, really dead. I’m telling you, obesity can be a bitch.
As for the strangest reaction to the man giving Toronto City Hall the feel of a Hell’s Angel clubhouse, it has to belong to the law-and-order, tough-on-crime Harper government.
Julian Fantino, a former freakin’ police chief, said he didn’t “want to get into it.” Jim Flaherty — the law-and-order man from Mike Harris’s day — sheds a tear for the family.
And then Peter MacKay steps in it again — first the right foot, then the left.
Here’s what Canada’s justice minister said when the sinophile currently leading the Liberal Party admitted to taking a toke:
“By flouting the laws of Canada while holding elected office he shows he is a poor example for all Canadians, particularly young ones. Justin Trudeau is simply not the kind of leader our country needs.”
But when Rob Ford admits to buying and smoking drugs — including crack cocaine — while holding elected office? When he admits to drinking and driving, maybe even drinking on the job? Not a word about law-breaking from Peter. Not a word about fitness for office. Not a peep about coming up a tad short in the role model department. No, Peter MacKay gushes compassion and intones that that the mayor “needs help”.
This is hypocrisy squared. On the one hand there is MacKay’s partisan hypocrisy, offensive because it involves issues of equal justice. On the other, there is the Conservative Party of Canada’s deep policy hypocrisy.
Back in 2008, when Tony Clement was health minister, he met the Canadian Medical Association in Montreal. After being showed a copy of what the minister planned to say at the convention, then CMA Executive Director Bill Tholl conferred with his members; “I told them the minister was going to poke out their eyes at ten o’clock the next morning.”
Clement was accusing the doctors of violating their Hippocratic Oath with their support of East Vancouver’s safe injection sites for heroin addicts. The doctors argued that drug addiction was best treated as a harm-reduction health issue.
“You don’t understand. For me and this government, this is an existential issue,” Tholl remembered being told by Clement. “This government exists to address serious issues of law-and-order, including putting drug addicts in prison.”
Now you know why Stephen Harper, guest of honour in ROFO’s backyard, where the PM’s praise for Ford was thicker than the barbecue sauce, has not opened his mouth on his fishing buddy’s admitted law-breaking.
There’s a limit to how far you can go on ROFO madness. Even Dear Leader must know it’s hard to forge a dynasty with a guy they don’t want at the Santa Claus parade.
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