Columnists lose it as Rob Ford rolls on

The Toronto mayoral frontrunner already has op-ed writers at each other's throats, and he hasn't even been elected yet.

On every news outlet’s payroll, there is at least one columnist whose role it is to get under your skin. They’re not hard to spot: Ezra Levant at the Sun, Rosie DiManno at the Toronto Star. They usually write a couple of inflammatory columns a week, which fade as quickly as they appear. But every once in a while, another columnist starts slinging ink back. And sometimes, like they did today, things get personal. It’s not very informative, but it’s very entertaining.

In this corner we have Heather Mallick, a left-leaning writer who contributed today’s now requisite anyone-but-Rob-Ford-for-mayor column in the Toronto Star. “Voting for Ford is like sleeping with someone to get revenge on your spouse,” she writes. “It seems like a good idea at closing time,” but the day after “you wake in a hard, unfamiliar bed. And there's something in bed next to you. It is the sweaty, beer-smelling oik from the bar last night.” Mallick goes on to decry Ford’s supporters as “angry, old, white male voters” and paints a picture of a gridlocked Toronto under Ford’s reign: “The TTC is pouting, the snowplows are parked, and the gentle City employees who counsel on power and pipes are manning a picket line.”

In the opposite corner we have the National Post’s Jonathan Kay. Mallick, Kay says, “whines constantly — both in her column and in real life.” He’s alarmed by “the three, interrelated obsessions that infuse almost all of Mallick’s writing: (1) feminist self-pity; (2) a curdled hatred of the men (always white, often poor and unlettered) … and (3) a creepy fascination with male sexual dysfunction.” And her description of Ford’s white supporters “would bring you up on hate-speech charges if you said it about women or immigrants.” Kay doesn’t want to write these things, he assures us, but “Mallick cannot be ignored, in the same way that one cannot ignore a woman sobbing in the corner of a coffee shop.”

You could always buy your coffee and walk out the door Mr. Kay, but it wouldn’t make for very good copy.