Liberals have bluelined with Diaper-Man

Christina Blizzard wrote in “Earth to George Smitherman” (Sun Media, Feb.29, 2008):

“Health Minister George Smitherman must surely be one of the most high profile and kamikaze examples of arrested development I have ever seen.
Look at his history of public confessions of things that are best left private. First there was a front-page picture of him weeping over the plight of abused people in long-term care facilities.
Then in 2006, he admitted to using "party drugs" at a time he was under stress because his father had been incapacitated by a stroke.
Last year, the openly gay minister mused in a scrum that he was considering wearing a thong to his wedding. And he's forever agonizing publicly about his weight. Talk about insecurity!
This week, the one-time Liberal attack dog left reporters scratching their heads after he announced that as "a matter of conscience," he has "seriously been considering" personally testing a new type of adult diaper.
Frankly, the image of Smitherman in a thong was bad enough. Now, we have seared in our collective consciousness the vision of him in a soiled diaper.
Hello? Earth to George. Too much information.
If anyone else in cabinet displayed that kind of erratic behaviour, there would be speculation that he was, well, a tad overwrought emotionally and that maybe he should take a break from his work to pull himself together.”

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It’s alarming that this Liberal is the sole minister responsible for the health care of some 13 million people in Ontario.

Let’s not forget to add to the above list the time Smitherman called Ontario’s optometrists terrorists.

Or, when Smitherman ridiculously 'deputized' Ontarians to be on the hunt for an evil Cleveland medical-diagnostic firm which wanted to cross the border to set up mobile screening clinics in Ontario.

Or, when Smitherman described himself in a Toronto Star column (Feb.19, 2005): "I'm as full of piss and vinegar as always". That might be figuratively correct, but now that Smitherman’s proposing wearing test-diapers, this may turn out to be a literally nauseating result as well.

I initially wondered whether Smitherman might have been planning to wear an industrial-size diaper on his head absorbent enough to soak up some of his excess Liberal rhetoric. Just where was he planning to wear this diaper for his experiment - casually around the office; over at the Legislature; at meetings with his constituents? I’ve heard that compulsive gamblers even use these diapers at casinos so as not to miss a potential lucky streak.

Speaking of streaks, the adult diaper can supposedly hold its contents until a blue-line streak materializes to indicate it's ready for changing. The controversy is whether adult diapers do the job sufficiently, rather than having incontinent patients looked after more frequently. Again, in our universal, Utopian, Liberal health-care-monopoly, the patient has little say in the matter – patients are lucky to get whatever George Smitherman and some union boss cook up and agree they can live with.

Rick Patrick wrote in the Toronto Star (Feb.21, 2005):

“George Smitherman insists that he's full of piss and vinegar. I agree. He is piss and vinegar personified. I live in a small town where I'm still on a waiting list for a doctor. My wife and I drove 100 kilometres on Thursday to order new eyeglasses and have our eyes examined. The examination, which used to be covered by OHIP, cost us $140, to add to the $450 extra we now pay for health premiums. That's $590 more than I paid last year, and eats up the entire amount of my pension increase for this year (1.7 per cent). And what did I get for my money? Nothing, except piss and vinegar.”

Despite all this; despite that these Liberals have themselves blue-lined with their health-care rhetoric a long time ago - they unfortunately weren’t changed in the Oct.07 election, so Ontarians will have to live with these kinds of stench-ridden political stunts until 2011.