Watching the 5th of 6 CP24 mayoral debates last night, Tweeting my impressions of the proceedings, I noted a certain lack of rigour, let’s call it, from the Ford supporters who were being asked to weigh in on location from a café in Scarborough. 
It was all bite size chunks of grievance and protest about the shenanigans going on at City Hall that might as well have come directly from the mouth of Rob Ford. In fact, I’m sure it has. Relentlessly and unwaveringly since he joined the campaign.
One person in particular drew my ire, rambling from talking point to talking point and somehow equating the cost of riding the TTC to Adam Giambrone’s taxi receipts he submitted while conducting his dirty personal business. “Enough with the illogically ill-informed,” I demanded. We get enough of that from the candidates running for office. Or words to that effect.
To which I received this response from someone going by the moniker of RegulusdeLeo: “@cityslikr Disgusted by the vulgar Tim Horton drinking voters?”
Ahh, yes. When asked to elevate the discourse with a little bit of reason and rationality, class warfare and resentment is unsheathed. 
Us haughty downtown elitists, looking down our noses at those who have to scrape together the pennies needed to buy themselves a medium double-double at Timmies while we fling $9 at the baristas at Starbucks for our skinny, veni, vedi, vici chai lattes. We have no idea about the problems they face, the anger they feel because we’re lapping it up on the Gravy Train.
Now you should know, @RegulusdeLeo is a rabid pro-Ford entity from Vaughan who fancies him/herself a speaker of “Truth to (Liberal) Power”. RegulusdeLeo clogs the Twitter-sphere with spam-like empty sloganeering. More like chants, really, championing the simple-minded Rob Ford doctrine of anti-government/anti-taxes. In between these bouts of cheerleading, @RegulusdeLeo tosses out the odd bit of cultural divisiveness such as, “Prefers READING the Quran to burning it. Of course I use a nice strip of crispy bacon as a bookmark!”
Yet, such a defender of the faith as @RegulusdeLeo, when asked to elaborate on and explain in more detail those political views resorts to, what I think patrons of Tim Hortons who love their hockey fights call, ‘turtling’. Covering up, hurling baseless invective, while waiting for their opponents to either tire of the confrontation or for the referee to step in and come to their rescue. 
You can’t engage in a discussion with those who don’t want to engage.
Which is the problem when confronting the beast that is the Rob Ford phenomenon. If you disagree it isn’t because you see flaws in their candidate’s ideas and platforms. You’re an out-of-touch elitist, unable to understand the struggles of the average Joes. Eye Weekly editor, Edward Keenan, pointed out an interesting comment to the story he wrote last week about a Rob Ford mayoralty. …You do not represent what those that work and pay tax want, he was castigated by a reader. As if those who haven’t embraced Rob Ford don’t work, don’t pay taxes.
We are all just dirty hippies, living down here in the core, sucking from the teat of big, bad government, dancing naked around the maypole and having immoral, unprotected sex with each other. Living high off the hog and mocking those who pay our way. What do we understand about working for a living, struggling to pay our bills, raising children?
It is a societal breach, manufactured at the behest of self-interested privilege and manned by those unwilling to put the effort into truly understanding the intricacies of governance. An elite that transcends geography or coffee shop chains and made up of those refusing to move beyond willful ignorance. 
You’re not the downtrodden, my friends. You’re the hearts and minds that make real change impossible and keep us locked into an ill-fitting assembly that benefits far fewer of us than we are capable of.
— unapologetically submitted by Cityslikr
I think it’s pretty ironic that the very people lapping at the Blob Ford trough are the ones that’ll be hurt the most by his ‘initiatives’. Fewer jobs (unless you’re lucky enough to be hired to deal cards or shovel horseshit at Woodbine Live), poorer transit, and of course his disdain for immigrants.
What do I know though, I’m just a pinko commie union-loving socialist facist fatcat riding the gravy train to Russia.
This “Blob Ford” moniker and associated website is one of the most childish & stupid things I’ve seen in the campaign. Immature, tasteless garbage that only damages the people who spread it in the eyes of everyone else.
The media created the “Rob Ford Effect”. Keeping him in the spotlight day after day has lead to a great amount of name recognition. The more the media jumps up and shouts “don’t look, don’t listen” the more the public will want to look and listen. It is like the episode of Ren and Stimpy with the “big, red, shiny button”.
Toronto is in a mess because half of those who live here have an IQ of 100 or less. Many of them must be voting otherwise why would Ford be leading. People are too lazy or simply don’t care about the other choices for mayor and neither does the media. If the citizens wish to not vote nor engage in learning about their choices they will elect the person who’s name sticks in their memory. Plain and simple, the more people hear a name the more they recognize it and it it doesn’t disturb them that is who they will vote for.
Smitherman has been trying to make the same kind of memorable claims as Ford but he is being outclassed .
I am limited by what I can do and since the media are only giving me a token notice the lazy and apathetic will not find out about me.
I am afraid that this time the damage to this wonderful city will cause many of the more affluent to move elsewhere close by and come to the attractions they would like to see. They may decide it is easier to go to other more exciting cities where they have terror threats and Broadway or Las Vegas where they have gambling and prostitute delivery services.
Maybe Rob Ford will live to regret getting what he wished for.
Nice! Just keep on insulting RF supporters and they will continue to flock to him. As I take a break from writing my thesis, I love to be called stupid, lazy, etc and lacking in IQ.
My first thought when reading your reply to Selwyn’s comment was “what a crock of shit” but I’m glad that, for once, I thought before I spoke because this actually does makes sense. I have a fourteen-year-old daughter and if I tried to goad her into being a productive member of society by telling her she’s lazy and will amount to nothing unless she gets off the couch, she’d just roll her eyes and wait an extra two days to brush her teeth. I imagine RF (or any candidate’s) supporters are the same. Telling someone they’re doing it wrong makes them obstinate and even more determined to stay their course. Instead we should be encouraging them to look past the same tired old overdone statements about gravy trains and useless Nathan Phillips Square renos and see what Rob is REALLY offering, which is a big helping of not much.
Mr. Firth, why would rich people move to cities where there are terror threats? I don’t follow your logic. Are you saying we should have more gambling and prostitution in Toronto to keep the rich from leaving?
As for “Torontonians won’t pick me because they are stupid”: while of course half of everyone will have an IQ below 100, I don’t think that’s the main “problem”. The fact of the matter is that most people aren’t paying much attention, feeling that they have more important things to do than politics, and when you don’t pay attention it’s the equivalent of being stupid. Ford started out with a strong base of “people paying attention” because of his years of work for the constituents in his ward, and he’s been able to build on that largely through word-of-mouth. Most people in the city don’t watch the debates or follow the newspapers too closely, but they will listen if someone they know like a guy (or even if they hear strangers talking positively about a guy). Ford started off with more of those people, and has been able to build on it by not screwing up and by the lackluster field of his media-sanctioned opponents (I think that the “top 5” are not actually the best candidates, but the media has made their choice and that’s that…).
Mr Firth, voting on anger and emotion isn’t unique to Toronto, or Canada, or North America. I think you would do well to slow your roll in insulting the very people from whom one assumes you’re looking to garner votes.
The people being polled and the people in the comments sections of the Star, Sun, etc do not represent the majority of Toronto, or even half. Ford has done his electioneering duty by mobilizing his supporters to ram these forums and spout his party lines, thus creating the illusion of momentum. Over time, this has snowballed into real momentum.
However, there is still a huge 25% of the population that are undecided, which means that if any one of the four leading non-Ford candidates can grab that, they will have a real chance of beating The Blob.
McFlash, do you have any proof that Ford had been personally directing supporters to ram online newspaper comment sections with pro-Ford comments and comment votes? I know there was a story a while back about “Rossi’s online army”, but that seems to not have been very successful.
I don’t (aren’t baseless accusations the bread and butter of this election though?), but the sheer number of people on those sites that are spouting rhetoric that is literally copied and pasted from Ford’s sites suggest that he’s done at least a bit of finagling in that department. As I said, a certain number of those probably do believe those slogans but I have honestly not heard the term ‘gravy train’ repeated so often, IN EARNEST, in my whole life.
Repetition sells products and ideas. The fact that you’ve stated “gravy train” illustrates that the message has been broadly received.
Selwyn might have an IQ over 100 but he’s not much for learning.
Nah, that’s not it. It’s just that if you spend your intellectual efforts becoming very good at one thing – let’s say chemistry and related areas – it may be at the expense of other areas, such as psychology or people skills. A lot of the world’s great scientists had a reputation for being poor in those, and Mr. Firth may be the same. The feeling among such people is typically “I shouldn’t NEED people skills, if people know what’s good for them”, and yes, there’s some truth to that. On the other hand, the job of mayor isn’t just dictating what should be done, but being the mediator and consensus-builder between people. It’s about trying to understand how people’s minds work and being able to find the key that will make them do what you want. Only after THAT does the quality of your own ideas come into play.
Good post. Are you on @regulusdeleo’s libtard list?
Dear Orwell’s Bastard,
We here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke hope we have made it onto @regulusdeleo’s list. If not, where do we sign up?