Stupidity times four
Tearing down the Gardiner, Miller the 'reformer,' the Foley follies and neocons
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN
This is an "items" column.
I'd like you to think I'm doing it because I have so many brilliant ideas pouring out of my head this week that I just had to get them all into print before they're lost to posterity.
Either that, or I just can't finish a complete thought.
In any event, here we go.
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Ever notice how an "artist's conception" of what a proposed street will look like in a consultant's report, always shows a few cars, happy pedestrians and stretches of open road?
You know, like those "artists' conceptions" in the recent report of the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp., depicting what the so-called "Great Street" that's would replace the Gardiner Expressway from Spadina Ave. to the Don Valley Parkway will look like, if it's ever built.
Right. Now, do you want to know what that "Great Street"is really going to look like? Okay, picture University Ave., both sides, including the office towers, from Front St. north to Queen's Park Circle -- at rush hour.
Now turn it 90 degrees in your mind's eye and float it down to the Gardiner at the Spadina exit. Now lower it to street level and picture it stretching east from Spadina to the DVP. That's what this nightmare is going to look like if it's ever built. And if you think that's going to "reunite" Torontonians with their lake, trust me, you need therapy.
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Could we please get one thing straight about the Toronto mayoral race? David Miller is not the "reform" candidate.
He's the establishment candidate. The candidate of the status quo. The candidate whose campaign is being guided by a collection of old Tory and Liberal backroom boys -- just like it was the last time.
And why are those backroom boys doing this? Trust me, it's not because they've all suddenly become New Democrats like Miller. They're doing it for the same reason other backroom boys used to guide Mel Lastman's mayoral campaigns.
What they expect in return, presuming Miller wins, is access to the mayor in between elections, which is priceless to them whether they're lawyers, lobbyists, consultants or businessmen.
Memo to U.S. Republicans: The next time you discover a sleazebag in your ranks like ex-Florida Congressman Mark Foley, could you please just immediately expose him, denounce him and toss him out of the party, while stating unequivocally that harassing teenage pages and firing off lewd e-mails to them is not just morally repugnant, but, for someone who posed as a defender of children from sexual exploitation, monstrously hypocritical? And stop blaming the Democrats for leaking stuff about Foley to the media. There'd have been nothing to leak if you'd done your job in the first place as the self-appointed guardians of "family values." Good Lord, you people make it embarrassing to be a conservative sometimes.
As for American Democrats trying to make political hay out of this case, after all the morally repugnant acts, rather than just e-mails, you were willing to give Bill Clinton a pass on, have you no shame? Oh, but that's right -- you're Democrats.
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On a related point, please, Americ an neo-conservative "thinkers," I'm begging you, do a little research about what's been going on in Canada for the past year or so before you go off on yet another half-baked rant about how everyone in Canada is an al-Qaida loving commie who wants free health care.
We now have a Conservative government headed by a prime minister, Stephen Harper, who's about as left-wing as Maggie Thatcher was in her prime, Canadian soldiers are on the sharp end of the stick fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan and polls show Canadians increasingly favour more private health care (almost a third already is private), if it will lead to better care.
Also, concluding that everyone in Canada thinks the same way as the Star, Globe and CBC is about as logical as saying that the New York Times, Washington Post and Air America represent everyone in the U.S. And for the last time, while we have major problems with our immigration and refugee system, just as you do, no 9/11 terrorists snuck into the U.S. from Canada! Sheesh. Read a book once in a while, will ya?
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