Rob and Doug Ford: You are excluded from reading this column.

No room here on above-the-fold Page 2 for the likes of our confessional-mode mayor and his contemptible-mode councillor brother, who just the other day said “He can go to hell” of an autistic boy’s father who had complained to the integrity commissioner, as reported by The Sun’s Don Peat, and further, accused naggers of the Brothers Grimm of being on “a full-out jihad.”

If it were within my power, I would call for a boycott against all Ford eyeballs, though boycotts in the news biz are apparently useless rather than principled — my ballsy colleague Royson James has argued the latter — and we’ve no right to deprive media audiences of information, especially so momentous an event as the mayor’s return to city hall duties (diminished as they may be) after two months in rehab. That re-surfacing occurred in a needlessly small venue, which was disingenuously blamed for the pick-and-choose list of media representatives invited.

At first, the A-list didn’t even include the Canadian Press city hall correspondent, the one reporter who files on behalf of everybody. That’s why, at the many “pooled” events I’ve covered — usually one print journalist, one TV journalist, one radio journalist — we newspaper wretches always defer to CP.

Royson took objection to the selective herd culling, and he was correct to call all of us out on the baa-baa-baa response to the Ford & Ford “infomercial” production — DoFo campaign manager and perennial shot-blocker for RoFo — where no questions were taken after the mayor concluded his Brother-Can-You-Spare-A-Boohoo apologia that jarringly segued into stump speech. While I may not quite embrace the boycott proposal, surely there was a better alternative than that all-but-mute audience, only the Star’s Daniel Dale shouting out a question. That, apparently, was against the rules. Except there are no such rules. Nowhere is it written that media must cleave to the willy-nilly parameters laid down by the Ford poltroons.

Ford, R. was supposed to emerge from rehab a changed, contrite, owning-up and transparently honest man. What I see is a somewhat lard-lite pol who appears to have ardently embraced, if poorly understood, the treatment catechism that replaces genuine responsibility with boilerplate confessional. (So now I know where to go to lose weight — that dry-out, drugs-off redoubt in Muskoka, which also appears to have functioned as a hook-up joint, at least for a certain Ford Cadillac Escalade and a discharged or otherwise egested habitué.)

The mea culpa Ford offered for his behavior sounded dubious, clearly scripted as it was (choke-up-here) and doubtless by somebody else. Within 24 hours, the mayor-in-name-only had back-tracked from interview commitments to those media agencies who’d won the one-on-one lottery, after the first couple of sit-downs proved too hard-ball (not really, only in Fordo World) than the Ford camp could stomach.

If this keeps up, we will have the weirdest mayoral campaign ever (as if it wasn’t bizarre enough already), where the incumbent refuses to endure reporters, except for Good Old Joe from the Sun, who continues to channel Ford, R. for the masses, as if the election were some kind of séance and our chief magistrate speaking to us from a great beyond dimension.

Polls indicate ,voters are hugely skeptical of the New & Improved Rob Ford, and understandably so, since we’ve all been down this sorry-sorry-sorry garden path before. Many clearly expected the guy to tumble off the wagon, having reinserted himself into the tumult of political life. Personally, I don’t care whether Ford stays sober or keeps his nose cocaine-clean. His habits were not what made him most objectionable as elected official.

Yet that’s what Ford would have you believe: That it was the booze and the drugs that made him so revolting and foul-mouthed, though he made no mention in his repentance and redemption twaddle about the racist and homophobic screeds.

Ford has bought into the rehab mantra that he was born with a disease, which is theory open to vigorous medical and anthropological argument. But it certainly feeds the internally demonized postulation.

That’s not the point.

Ford was unfit for office on his most sober day at city hall. The nastiness, the maverick personality, the misanthropy, the small vision for Toronto — that’s all bred-in-the-bone Rob. His colossal ugliness as a human being has nothing to do with alcohol and addiction. Under the influence, he merely became more overtly and shamelessly what he’s always been, still is, and will forever remain:

A man without scruples, without boundaries, without any saving grace.

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Though not the scummiest Ford in the family.

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

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