Time: Toronto Mayor Accused of Smoking Crack Is ‘Canada’s Sarah Palin’

It’s been more than four years since Sarah Palin was the Republican candidate for vice president, but that hasn’t stopped the media from trashing the Tea Party favorite every chance it can get. In an online piece on Time’s Swampland blog, author Jay Newton-Small called Toronto’s Mayor Rob Ford, who was recently accused of smoking crack, Canada’s Sarah Palin.

The piece, which appeared on June 4, actually has nothing to do with Sarah Palin, other than that the mayor’s brother calls Ford “Canada’s Sarah Palin” apparently making it headline worthy. The sub-headline reads “Toronto Mayor Rob Ford -- Canada’s Sarah Palin -- is accused of smoking crack” hardly a headline the former Republican governor wants to be compared to.

If readers clicked on the actual article it would take them 11-paragraphs to see the one sentence smearing Palin by comparing the former governor to a crack-smoking Toronto mayor, but it still appears on the front-page of the Swampland blog.

The rest of the piece is fairly tame, with Newton-Small detailing how Toronto’s mayor is an unconventional politician, described as a “right wing populist” which is why his brother compares him to Sarah Palin. Unfortunately, readers would not know this by simply reading the headline of the article which focuses on his possible drug usage and disgustingly linking him to Sarah Palin.

Rather than offering a reasonable headline to describe Toronto’s controversial mayor, Time has instead chosen to disgustingly link Palin to drug usage, besmirching her name to score cheap political points. Hopefully the average Time reader will not read the headline and suddenly think Palin is a drug user herself, but as the article makes no effort to clarify the false headline in the actual article, some readers might believe the worst. It seems to much to ask that four years later the media would leave Palin alone and not drag her through the mud even more than she has.