LATEST FORDS CONTROVERSY IS MYSTIFYING

In response to reports that Toronto Police spent the summer conducting aerial surveillance of Mayor Rob Ford and his associates, Doug Ford suggested that the Downtown Elites have merely grown wings as part of their ongoing efforts to harass his beleaguere

Gurney Last week, one of Mayor Ford’s close friends, a man who recently sprang into the public’s attention after Ford’s troubles relating to the alleged crack video began this year, was arrested for various drug-related charges. I’m almost at the point where even that was sort of within my realm of expected contingencies. but then we found out this: the Toronto police have apparently been following Mayor Ford, and some of his associates, around etobicoke … in an airplane. even given all that we already know, the whole airplane thing is definitely unusual. And then there was doug Ford’s response to the whole thing. He got in touch with Joe Warmington over at the Toronto

Sun, and acted like the whole thing was no big deal. So you have an airplane following the mayor around. The mayor and his closest associates know this is the case. And the fiercely anti-tax, respect-the-little guy Ford family doesn’t find it odd that the police are spending so much time and energy investigating them?

Selley What doug told the Sun is just bizarre. He claims to have called up two superintendent friends at the police, who assured him that it was related to “a bust they were making at the airport.” can anyone just call up the cops and receive such assurances? In any event, he wasn’t having it. “you know when a plane is surveilling you,” said doug. really? What, from years of experience? He also claims the police have bugged the Ford family’s telephones, but hey, that’s no big deal. “rob is fine,” he assures us. “He has rhinoceros skin.” It’s all just (Ford’s words) “some elitist people in Toronto” (Warmington’s words) “trying to obtain the reins of power,” he says. What? It’s as if he has just casually added a bloody police investigation to the list of piddling annoyances the Fords have to endure as they fight relentlessly for the taxpayer. Will he say the same if they’re arrested for God knows what? Goldsbie Like buster Keaton with the house falling down around him, the comedy comes less from the increasingly elaborate situations in which the Fords become entangled than from their ever-more-improbable methods of escape. Things that would and should spell disaster for any other living human become no more than setups for the city’s favourite gag: how will those crazy Fords manage to get out of this one? rob typically dodges, evades, and lies, while doug typically describes a deranged alternate reality in which he and his brother are perfect and the rest of the world is mad. They make a great double act, further leavened by interstitials of slapstick farce, such as Sandro Lisi’s zany efforts to escape the media at Old city Hall. And it will always get weirder. One of [rob] Ford’s greatest successes has been to live his life so outlandishly that the truth can seem utterly implausible.