Not All He Was Cracked up to Be

Rob Ford, whose political career was one crash through a coffee table away from being a Chris Farley biopic, has died of cancer at the age of 46. In a related story, Canada announced it had won its war on drugs. Canada’s Marion Barry served 3 terms as city councilor, during which time he fought with colleagues and the press, maligned people with AIDS and cyclists – but praised hard-working “Orientals” – and was rewarded by being elected mayor of Toronto in 2010. One of his campaign themes was that "Toronto's government has grown bloated and wasteful," taking advantage of Canadian’s inborn decency to not point out the irony. After a number of public intoxication incidents and several incidents of spousal abuse he truly tested the limits of that decency by dragging the country through a scandal centered on his desire to drink, smoke or shoot whatever he could get his meaty paws on. After first denying all allegations, he eventually admitted to public drunkenness, drinking and driving and illegal drug use, though he explained away his smoking crack by postulating that it probably occurred during one of his drunken stupors. Protip – if you have so many drunken stupors that you lose count, and use one of those drunken stupors as an excuse for smoking crack, you may have a problem. Under the bizarre laws of America’s hat, Toronto’s City Council could not remove Ford from office, but was able to strip away most of his mayoral authority. He at first planned to run for re-election, but the discovery of an abdominal tumor led him to scale back to trying to reclaim his City Council office, with his ever-polite Canadian constituency obligingly re-electing him.