Is Rob Ford Toronto’s version of Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi?

Frank Touby —Morsi&Ford

Rob Ford, in his pre-mayoral persona, seemed so perfectly suited to be the leader of the city. He sounded so informed and so on top of things, so reasoned in his views.

I heard him a lot on CFMJ’s morning show hosted by John Oakley from studios at Sugar Beach. He would cite the outrageous expenses being run up at city hall and made perfect sense.

I now wonder if it wasn’t Oakley who provided some of that information and the reasoned response seemingly elicited from Ford.

When he talked about the “gravy train,” Ford had the numbers down and the senseless expenditures documented for the radio audience. No question the Miller city council behaved like boobs.

Miller himself was a grotesque disappointment. Having sat on council for years before raising his blond locks and shaking a blond broom, he fooled us into electing him. Rob Ford fooled us also.

Miller, it was almost immediately clear after he became mayor, really didn’t know a damned thing about how the city worked and had mostly sat in council looking pretty.

Once he took the mayor’s broom, knowing nearly nothing, Miller was depending upon the most biased, self-interested and often non-resident forces at city hall: city staff.

As an example of how lame-brained the Harvard-educated new mayor was regarding his job and responsibilities, he actually institutionalized and perpetuated the corrupting forces known as lobbyists. They’re the bullshit artists who try to bribe councillors and city staff in various ways to promote the clients who hire them.

It’s rarely outright cash bribes from lobbyists, but can be as subtle as pure flattery and as gross as promising election support. They’re salespeople who because of Miller’s dumb registry, are legitimized at city hall to do the illegitimate.

Even with pot on his breath, Ford seemed like fresh air in comparison. He would go out of his way to help almost anyone in the city. So what if they lived in Scarborough? They could call Rob and he’d respond. A real man of the people.

The sort of guy who should be mayor. An epic kind of guy.

And if he hung around with shady characters, it’s because he was just open to people and didn’t shut anyone out. He perhaps even good-handedly grabbed the well-turned “ass” (her words) of a dreadlocked white woman who has her own political ambitions. That’s what she says, anyhow. Why should she lie?

After a few tokes of some really good shit, why Robbie might just be in a glad-handed mood and find a shapely bottom irresistible.

So now the police have spent lots of our taxes tracking down the various alleged misdeeds Rob may have committed, none of which seem worthy of anything beyond showing us what we know, that he’s not behaving in a mayoral manner. But it doesn’t appear that he’s obviously guilty of anything illegal, save perhaps drinking in a park. But we don’t even know that because the liquor bottles would have to bear his fingerprints and it would be unseemly for the police to spend those resources to catch him in a minor misdemeanour.

So now those in the major media have agreed that Rob Ford should go. He probably knows how ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi felt when, after winning a fair election and allowing some freedoms in a more open regime than expected from the Muslim Brotherhood, the armed forces moved to replace him.

Archetypal.

True, Morsi may have just been building up goodwill before turning Egypt over to murderous Islamists. Or not. And maybe Rob Ford would have turned over Toronto to crack dealers, gangbangers, pot heads and ass-grabbers.

We’ll never know.