Let Rob Ford Sleep Alone

Will newspapers please stop making us picture Rob Ford having sex with Toronto Star columnists?

As heated as Toronto's mayoral election was, the real knife fight was in the op-ed pages, where things got very ugly and very weird. The main combatants were the Toronto Star and the National Post, whose writers clearly thought the Star’s strong ‘anybody-but-Rob Ford’ slant was an insult to the journalistic profession.

“Seldom has a newspaper bared its bias more shamelessly than the Star,” writes the Post’s Kelly McParland, reveling in the fact that Tuesday was “a dark day" for the Toronto paper. Most distasteful to McParland (and to and to anybody unfortunate enough to read it) was a now infamous column by Heather Mallick in which she compared electing Ford to having drunken sex with a fat “oik.” The images that piece conjured up were bad enough, but McParland really lowers the bar today by gloating, “Not only is last night's oik in (Mallick’s) bed, but the Viagra is just kicking in.” She’s going to get screwed, get it? Isn’t unwanted sex funny?

Mallick herself wisely abandons the sleeping-with-Ford theme in her column in the Star today, which sees her sharing a pillow not with the portly candidate but with the entire city. “You have made your bed, Toronto, and you must lie in it,” she writes. “My only problem is that I must lie in it with you.” Now she compares voting to Ford with getting a tattoo, because a “tattoo is something you get because you damn well feel like it but is not in your long-term interests.” Tired metaphors aside, Mallick does make an interesting point about Ford’s attempts to slash the city’s taxes. “He will make whatever cuts he can, but it won’t fix the central problem. The (Conservative) federal government is ideologically anti-tax, which it displays by downloading costs onto the provinces, which shovels them onto cities.”

Perhaps taking the Post’s criticism seriously, the Star’s editorial on Ford today reads like it was spit out by a dispassionate op-ed machine, which we hope is not a real thing, or is at least out of The Mark’s price range.