Corbella: Mayor Ford won’t be afforded compassion for his ‘disease’
Maybe now that Rob Ford has allegedly been caught on tape smoking crack cocaine, we can finally dispense with the nonsense that drug use is a disease. It’s not, it’s a choice.
Funny how quickly, though, lefties who use that excuse for beautiful losers they admire, or for the downtrodden on their city streets, have abandoned their hackneyed mantra when a person they despise is a user.
So, thank you, Mayor Ford. According to your enemies, you are not a victim or someone suffering from a disease. Here’s hoping that the ridiculous claim that every alcoholic and drug addict is not unlike someone with renal failure or cancer is put to rest.
But here’s also hoping that this story will expose the hypocrisy, viciousness and lack of compassion of those elites who have been out to first ensure Ford was not elected Toronto’s mayor, and then doing everything in their power to discredit him and to use the courts to remove him from office because they didn’t like the outcome.
On Thursday, the U.S. website Gawker posted a report by John Cook, who alleges that he saw a cellphone video of Ford smoking from a glass pipe what a Toronto drug dealer alleges is crack cocaine.
The drug dealer has been shopping the video around to media outlets, initially for $100,000, and now $200,000.
The Gawker website is attempting to raise the needed cash through crowd-sourcing donations, and by late afternoon Friday, it had already raised $34,000.
After Gawker posted the story, the Toronto Star decided to publish the report it had been working on for a couple of weeks. Two reporters at the Star say they watched the video three times and that Ford is clearly visible and the room he’s in is well lit. But no one else has seen the video and it’s impossible to independently verify the allegations, or even whether the video is undoctored.
Mayor Rob Ford has dismissed the claims.
“These allegations are ridiculous,” Ford told scores of reporters at Toronto City Hall on Friday. “It is another story with respect to the Toronto Star going after me and that’s it. That’s all I’ve got to say for now.”
This wouldn’t be the first time Ford has been in trouble for alleged illicit drug use. Way back in February 1999, a then 29-year-old Ford was charged with possession of marijuana and driving under the influence while vacationing in Florida.
The marijuana charge was later dropped. While campaigning for office in 2010, Ford denied the 11-year-old Florida charge.
There have been other allegations that he has been drunk at various events and was recently asked to leave a military function in Toronto. The Star put that on their front page. Ford denied those allegations as well.
That the Star, and many of its loyal readers, has had it out for Ford is no secret.
Toronto’s Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday told CBC Newsworld that the Star has been relentless in pursuing Ford.
“(Star reporters) have followed him, they have gone to his home and spied on his backyard, they have gone to his summer cottage up near Huntsville, they followed his mother, they’ve talked to his neighbours, they’ve done things to this mayor that no other mayor has ever had done to him, and it wasn’t in the name of trying to find out whether he was doing drugs, it was just to try to find something that they could bring up against him,” said Holyday.
There is clearly a double standard in how the Star and others treat Ford and how the Star treated B.C. NDP MP Svend Robinson for stealing a $65,000 ring in 2004.
On April 17, 2004, the Star actually awarded Robinson a laurel in its Darts and Laurels feature: “For taking medical leave; the controversial NDP MP showed courage by stepping aside after stealing a diamond ring, which he blamed on ‘inner turmoil’ that caused him to snap.”
In fact, Robinson only turned himself in to police after he learned that there was surveillance video of him pocketing the valuable bauble. But Robinson’s politics follow the Star’s sensibilities and views, so he was treated with love and compassion.
The Star was relentless in going after Ford for soliciting donations from City Hall associates for the soccer team of underprivileged kids that he coaches. It wanted him stripped from office for that. It’s perverse morality to be sure.
If it’s true that Ford has smoked crack, he should resign. It would prove he has terrible judgment. Marion Barry, the former mayor of Washington, D.C., however, was videotaped smoking crack cocaine in January 1990, and after serving time in jail, he was elected to city council in 1992 and was re-elected mayor in 1994, serving from 1995 to 1999.
Barry claimed to be a victim and that his drug use was a disease.
But it wasn’t a disease then and it isn’t a disease now. It’s a choice. A bad choice, but a choice nonetheless. If it were a disease, it would be impossible for people to quit it. How many people, after all, have been able to quit cancer or glaucoma through willpower?
As for Gawker it says this:
“We are mindful that people who hang out with and surreptitiously record crack-smoking mayors may not always be reliable. The people we’ve been dealing with have so far honoured every commitment they’ve made. And they have pledged to sell it to us for $200,000 if this Crackstarter works. But if they disappear, or sell it elsewhere, we will donate every penny we receive to a Canadian non-profit that helps people suffering from addiction and its consequences.”
One has to wonder if that would include helping fat, heterosexual, white guys who live in the suburbs? Not a chance.
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