Is Goldstein Giving Miller Too Much Credit

Personally elevating Miller to the idiot level is an insult tothose who work hard as being idiots. With Miller it seems to come naturally.

He's running on his record?

I can think of one word to describe mayor

By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN

To hear Toronto Mayor David Miller's media and political shills tell it, everyone running against their fair-haired boy -- most notably Coun. Jane Pitfield and former Liberal party president Stephen LeDrew -- is an idiot.

So I figure it's a good thing we have a genius like David Miller running for mayor -- again -- because just think of all the nonsense an idiot might have gotten into as mayor over the past three years.

For example, only an idiot would have promised taxpayers that stopping the bridge to the Island airport wouldn't cost them more than a toonie, apparently having missed the class in law school that explains what happens when you break signed agreements and legal contracts.

And only an idiot in the face of that fiasco (and abject failure to stop the airport from expanding) would then try to revive the Island airport as an issue for this election.

Only an idiot would have been one of the leaders of the campaign against Toronto dumping its garbage into the ground near Kirkland Lake in 2000 as environmentally unsound, before coming up with a secret, 11th-hour deal, rubber-stamped by council in 2006, to dump Toronto's garbage into the ground near London. All this while previously supporting dumping Toronto's garbage into the ground in Michigan after shipping it there by truck.

Only an idiot would have done all that while rejecting widely-used modern incineration as an option for Toronto's garbage, while touting wildly optimistic and unrealistic plans for Toronto to divert almost all of its waste stream by 2010.

Only the political allies of an idiot would have made their first big statement on fighting crime in Toronto by getting rid of a police chief whom most people thought was doing a good job. And only an idiot would have made an asinine crack such as "Is your police force in jail? Mine is," to a visiting dignitary from London, England.

Only an idiot would have suggested something as stupid as requiring law-abiding gun owners to store their legal guns in a central depot in Toronto, while people were being gunned down at a record rate on our streets last year by criminals using illegal guns.

Only an idiot, having finally been dragged kicking and screaming into acknowledging that, yes, putting more cops on our streets actually helps fight crime, would then claim credit for leading the charge to put more cops on our streets.

Only an idiot, faced with a nepotism scandal at City Hall, would initially claim there was nothing wrong with city councillors helping their relatives get jobs there, as long as unspecified proper procedures were followed, and then only call in the city's integrity commissioner for an opinion on this issue after putting his foot in his mouth.

Only an idiot, faced with propping up a council ally whose best-before date has long since passed, an ally who repeatedly gets dinged by the integrity commissioner for things like trying to sneak through a pay raise for city councillors, would keep on supporting said ally, even after the respected chief general manager of the city's public transit commission quit his job in disgust, citing constant political interference by said ally.

Only an idiot whose re-election campaign is being run by some of the most well-known Tory and Liberal backroom boys in Canada would allow said backroom boys to put out a fundraising letter on his behalf warning that "powerful interests" were out to unseat him as mayor, given all the "powerful interests" that are now aligned behind keeping him in power.

So yeah, it's a good thing we don't have an idiot like that running for mayor, because who knows what he might do with another four years in power?