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Yikes.

At a scheduled press conference in Tillsonburg, Ford dismissed the allegations of nomination shenanigans as old news. He said the party’s appeals process had found them baseless. He said he had never paid for anyone else’s membership. And as for intimidating Martino, he said it simply never happened.

Could be. But Doug Ford hasn’t won many truth-telling contests in his time.

The world-weary sophisticate set wants you to believe it’s no biggie. “Everyone does it,” they say: every political operative worth his salt has bought memberships, stuffed ballot boxes, dragooned unsuspecting seniors into voting for their guy or otherwise gamed the system. But of course, no accused candidate would actually mount this defence. I like to believe they realize, at least at some vestigial level, that what they’re describing is absolutely Third World bananas. (I believe political parties should be as free as possible to run their own business, but it is far past time for an intervention.)

Photo by Brian Thompson/Brantford Expositor/Postmedia

The other dismissive response is that it’s “inside baseball” — voters are too stupid and indolent to understand or care about the internal processes through which parties pick their candidates. There might be some evidence for this: even as the Tories paraded their filthy disgusting laundry all across the province for two months after Brown’s departure, their polling numbers hardly budged.

Only people are paying attention now, and the Tories’ polling numbers have budged, and only one of the two parties with a chance of winning this thing continues to present itself as a bankrupt circus. “Everybody does it” is a hell of a lot more compelling an argument when there’s any contemporary evidence of anyone else doing it.