Paying The Piper

On Thursday, Andrew Mitrovica summarized what we know about Rob Ford:

We now know this about Ford. He is a habitual liar. He is said to have uttered racist and homophobic slurs. He pisses behind elementary schools in broad daylight. He has repeatedly exchanged suspicious packages at suspicious times with an alleged drug trafficker who was once his occasional driver.

He threatens to kill people. He refuses to be interviewed by police who have — ever so politely — asked him to answer a few questions. He’s purchased and consumed hard drugs. His friends and acquaintances include an alleged extortionist and gangsters, who were apparently willing to blackmail Toronto’s mayor over video showing him smoking cocaine from a crack pipe. He may have offered thugs $5,000 and a car for the video. A young gang member he was pictured with outside an alleged crack house was subsequently murdered. That man may have had a copy of that infamous video. A former Ford staffer feared that the man’s homicide may have been connected to the crack video. Drug traffickers “love and respect him.” 

The day before, Lawrence Martin, writing about the Harper government, declared:

Never in all my years of political coverage have I seen a government get caught up in so many deceptions, falsehoods and bare-assed lies as this one.

It has reached the point where it is becoming difficult for any journalist to accept anything Stephen Harper and company say at face value.

The problem is that we knew that both of these men behaved this way before we elected them. Time has only confirmed that behaviour is spades. The question is, knowing what we were getting, why did we elect them? The answer is in their common program: Lower taxes, and bitter resentment.

 They have delivered on both promises. And now we must pay the piper.

The Quaint Notion Of Responsibility

While Rob Ford insists that he has no reason to resign, and the prime minister's story changes every day, Andrew Coyne writes that the concept of responsibility has become a quaint notion -- a relic of the past:

There was a time when public office holders were expected to take responsibility for these things, as a matter of personal honour if nothing else. But conventions last only as long as they are observed. Today, the prime minister clings to his position — I was the victim of a conspiracy involving everyone around me — as tightly as Senator Duffy clings to his paycheque.

Indeed, the notion that conventions matter is itself a convention. In recent years they have been discarded by the dozen, and the faster they fall the less any of them are missed. A glance at the headlines is enough to see how little remains.

Consider the case of Mr. Harper:

To recap, the prime minister is not responsible. He is not responsible for appointing Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau to the Senate. He is not responsible for appointing senators from provinces in which they were not resident, and he is not responsible for their subsequent activities shilling for the Tories across the country at public expense.

No, the people who are responsible are his enemies. Mr. Ford claims that The Toronto Star -- which broke the story of the video allegedly showing Ford smoking crack cocaine --  is the source of his troubles.

I have a friend of fifty years, a true political conservative, who has taken to referring to Mr. Harper as Prime Minister Nixon. Harper lost his support the day David Emerson crossed the floor and joined the government. He also originally supported Rob Ford. But not now. He says he's tired of the chain of lies.

One wonders how many other conservatives feel as he does.