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Conrad Black and the Watergating of Rob Ford

“The Rob Ford controversy is following a traditional pattern,” wrote known felon Conrad Black in Saturday’s National Post, referencing all those other controversies that have politicians boasting about their at-home access to a cunnilingus smorgasbord, joining his goodly baroness in clucking his defense of Toronto’s beleaguered mayor. Like his wife, Barbara Amiel, Black believes that Ford is the victim of “a mob controlled by the ideological left and the vast mass of those who enjoy (no matter how tawdry or parochial the details) watching the mighty fall.”

Like anyone desperate to vindicate Rob Ford, Black makes out like the mayor has been pilloried by the left, ran out on the rails (if only that were true) by political enemies (including the media) too impotent and facile to sufficiently upset Ford at the ballot box. For Black, Ford’s various embarrassments and humiliations – inflicted upon our city, if not himself like George W. Bush before him, Rob Ford seems 100% unable of feeling anything like shame or self-mortification, feelings which often go a long way toward checking the nastier impulses of the truly stupid – are not inherently idiotic. Rather, they’re merely conflated into idiocy by an adversarial bloc determined to make the mayor appear to be a buffoon, instead of unveiling the buffoonery intrinsic to his character.

“The mayor,” writes Black, in the paper he founded in 1998, “appears to be competent to continue in the task which he was elected to perform.” To prove this, Black follows the conservative, pro-Ford party line, referring to Rob Ford’s fiscal record, despite numerous reports that the mayor’s claims of saving Toronto $1 billion are just another of the his grandly exaggerated (self-)delusions.

As if his airheaded deference to this oft-debunked Fordian policy cliché weren’t enough, Black writes off the mayor’s bad behaviour as being no big deal, claiming that “a very large number of other people” also use crack cocaine (citations) needed. He also refers to impaired driving – which accounted for 121 reported deaths in 2011 – with insolent whimsy as “the odd whirl at the wheel of a car when a breathalyzer, if applied, could be problematical.” Drunk driving can also prove “problematical” when drunk drivers run over and kill people because they are driving shittily because they’re hammered. That’s very problematical.

Black even goes so far to as to defend Watergate, writing that “[t]he greatest wound democratic government has suffered in 50 years was self-inflicted, and it was the popularization, for a time glorification, of the criminalization of policy differences in the infamous Watergate scandal.” This would be astounding, maybe, if anyone other than Conrad Black were writing.

Black is a longtime defender of Richard Nixon, never missing a chance to call out the “agreed demonology” that led to the president’s resignation, basically: the media served as an agent of the Democratic Party in over-reporting on the scandal, in a joint coup to oust Nixon from office. Beyond illuminating the ways in which Black seems incapable of not allying his sympathies with other white conservative males who found themselves innocent victims of a left-wings conspiracy (reading Black on Nixon or Ford is like watching David Mamet’s comically redemptive Phil Spector biopic) the sentiment is extremely revealing.

Watergate belongs to history as one of the most egregious miscarriages of presidential authority, a case of the most powerful man in the world OK’ing illegal activity like burglary and wiretapping. In certain circles, it also represents one of the more diligent cases of the media working to undermine government collusion.

This is not to say that the efforts of Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein pass every conceivable sniff test. (Their extensive use of anonymous sources wouldn’t pass muster these days though even this bears certain resonances with certain Ford exposes, like The Globe’s largely anonymously-sourced summertime spread dedicated to Rob and Doug’s high school drug dealing dalliances.) But given that measures of power retained by these journalists’ targets (be it the Fords or the GOP), in the slapdash, often out-and-out illegal manner with which they wield it, it seems reasonable for sources to fear their safety, and so just as reasonable for journalists to protect their anonymity. To use of unidentified sources doesn’t do a lot to strengthen the credibility of the reporting. But given the context, it doesn’t damningly undermine it, either. Against targets that exhibit a broad, brazen disdain for democracy, the institutions of democracy (including the media) must be plastic. Democracy must be adaptive.

Conrad Black, and wealth-flaunting social elites like him, are the staunch, immovable objects around which democracy must learn to operate. Black is, as Norman Mailer writes of the new class of American plutocrats, a member of “an obscenely wealthy upper upper class who, given the in-built, never-ending threat to their wealth, is bound to feel no great allegiance in the pit of its heart for democracy.” Rob Ford shares with these sorts of trivial people a certain set of loose political values. Ford uses his whole “sticking up for the taxpayer” shtick as a smokescreen for safeguarding the wealth of the middle, upper, and even Mailer’s upper upper classes (we may like to believe that a 1% of the insanely rich exists in Canada, but then…Conrad Black).

Likewise, Black and other plutocrats use Ford as their own sort of smokescreen. Ford’s gruesomely configured, laughably unjustified “everyman” quality (the Ford family business rakes in over $100 million in annual sales) is the bulbous bulwark behind which the Baron and Baroness can hide. Never is this more apparent than in Black’s recent column, which concludes with some alligator tears shed for “large echelon of the population that identifies with the mayor,” whom he believes to be, by proxy, mocked implicitly by those who wish to squash this whole Rob Ford problem. Among the items found billed to Black’s newspaper empire during his own white-collar fraud scandal were $2,463 in handbags and $2,785 in opera tickets. Is this how the everymen and -women of Ford’s constituency accessorize?

We all knew Ford Nation’s heart was in Etobicoke. But who knew its screaming moral conscience lay safely north in the Bridle Path, living in his father’s legacy mansion erected on seven acres of prime real estate?

Mediaocrity runs every so often.

johns@nowtoronto.com | @johnsemley3000

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