Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has already admitted to smoking crack. Rob Ford has already admitted to being a bit of an idiot while drunk. Rob Ford has, in a rather bizarre admission, admitted that he’s a big fan of pleasing his wife. But should Rob Ford be removed from office for being kind of a mess when he’s off the clock? While Ford’s track record in office, between the (alleged) drunken brawling and the (alleged) groping of staffers and the reading behind the wheel and calling bike-riders communists and the (alleged) ushering of his preferred guests onto city boards has left a bad taste in some voters’ mouths, it seems that, if Ford were to work in the U.S., he’d be handed a cigar and a cowboy hat and offered a seat in a Bush-run White House.
In fact, Ford seems to be achieving near monastic levels of self-discipline by American standards. While Canadians are calling for Ford to step down from office, they very politely have no recourse to compel him until he’s convicted of a crime. When posed with a similar situation, Americans re-elected D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, who, in a remarkable killing two birds with one stone scenario, smoked crack while attempting to cheat on his wife. Following his release from prison, Barry won back his mayorship and, being the charmer that he is, told voters to “get over it.”
While George W. Bush often gets credit for being the White House’s most reckless president in recent memory (and, to be fair, only one commander-in-chief has hired a co-captain who’s shot someone in the face), Bill Clinton‘s Little Rock Lothario act should hardly be overlooked. Not only did Slick Willy ruin Monica Lewinsky‘s charming blue suit, then perjure himself while trying to cover it up, he also made a kind of sort of dubious seeming move by lobbing bombs into Iraq during his impeachment hearings which, conveniently, preempted a special report regarding Lewinsky’s testimony before congress.
In the legislative branch, at least Tom DeLay may have made a profit off his money laundering activities. Jesse Jackson Jr. got a taxidermied elk head for his felony campaign fund misuse trouble. It’s only a year ago that head of the CIA Gen. David Petraeus was outed for sleeping with his own biographer, Paula Broadwell.
Looking abroad you’ve got ex-Italian president Sylvio Berlusconi’s “bunga bunga” parties; former head of the IMF Dominque Strauss-Kahn’s penchant for getting in trouble in hotels; in China, Bo Xilai got some kind of zillion year sentence for his unfathomably bad acts; and, well, God only knows what Vladimir Putin is doing right this second.
Rob Ford looks like he should be getting a Boy Scout badge right about now.
Crack smoking aside, he did ruin a hockey game — and in Toronto, you might as well have started a war.
From Montreal to Winnepeg to Vancouver, you can watch all the Canadian TV you can stand via FilmOn.
(There’s even Disney — en Francais!)
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