Marion, Buried

(Props to Monty)
Marion Barry, inspiration for the character of Rob Ford, has died of a heart attack at the age of 78, about the only thing that would preclude him from holding elected office in Washington. A prominent civil rights activist who organized the Nashville Student Movement sit-ins and then served as the first chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Barry was elected as the second Mayor of the District of Columbia in 1979. All was going mostly swimmingly, except for some skimming and no-bid contracts for his buddies, addictions to booze and cocaine fueled in late-night binges that left him asleep at his desk (Of course, in his defense, "First, it was not a strip bar, it was an erotic club. And second, what can I say? I'm a night owl.") His subsequent inattentiveness hindered city services, as city crews mismanaged a blizzard clean-up (He later commended how “The contagious people of Washington have stood firm against diversity during this long period of increment weather.”) and police officers lacked cars to get to crime scenes, contributing to a skyrocketing homicide rate. (Though Barry explained that “If you take out the killings, Washington actually has a very very low crime rate.") Then the Bitch set him up and he was videotaped smoking crack cocaine in a hotel room, leading to his arrest by the FBI and a 6-month conviction for possession. He took a sabbatical from the Mayor’s office in federal prisons in Petersburg, Virginia (where he was alleged to have gotten conjugal in a waiting room) and Loretto, Pennsylvania, before being returned by a forgiving electorate in 1995. He left office again in 1999, but the Mayor for Life returned to represent Ward 8 on the Council of the District of Columbia from 2005 to 2014, declining to pay taxes during any of that time. Among the highlights of his tenure were racial epithets against the Asian-American business community in his Ward, then referring to “Polacks” during his apology for said comments, ironic given his assertion that “The laws in this city are clearly racist. All laws are racist. The law of gravity is racist.”