Gravydämmerung: Happy Ford Finally Admitted Doing Crack Day!

[sabotabby]

Shorter Rob Ford: "I am so sincerely sorry that I got caught."

Another good twist: The Honourable Wife-Beater hired a hacker to destroy the crack tape.

This is totally my favourite, though. Faced with irrefutable proof that the Laughable Bumblefuck smoked crack, hung out with gangbangers, and lied about it all, his other head, Dougie, goes on the attack, calling for police chief Bill Blair to step down.

Note: Bill Blair should have stepped down over the G20 debacle and almost certainly covered up evidence to protect the Fords in the past. It's one of those situations that I really enjoy in fiction where both sides are really evil and you are rooting for them both to destroy each other in the most bombastic possible explosion.

God this is good. I love living in Toronto.

Comments

[outcastspice.livejournal.com]

I'm so mad that he's still mayor.

[sabotabby]

Console yourself with this: The longer he's mayor, a) the more evil shitbags he can drag down with him, and b) the less likely a more presentable right-wing person will step in and carry out his policies.

George Smitherman, but less faggy?

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

I hate to rain on your schadenparade, but I fear that (for once) you're quite wrong.

The ostensible centre with present some ostensible liberal as a compromise candidate, possibly with some nice leftish rhetoric and promises (spare Change, spare Hope?), then carry out those policies in a vastly more efficient and effective fashion.

As Cerebus the Aardvark once (roughly) said, "You can't conquer squat with peasants and livestock."

Not that it isn't fun to watch Ford squirm and to hope he drags some evil shitbags down with him, but like cockroaches, there are so many who will happily step up to do their masters' bidding that my Inner Cynic doesn't think it matters at all.

[sabotabby]

I dunno. I mean, Rae managed to—sans an actual personal scandal—fuck things up for the NDP in Ontario for decades.

But yeah, we'll get a Smitherman clone unless someone like Chow runs.

[misslynx.livejournal.com]

I was thinking last night that if she ran, it would be really interesting to see how that might affect the vote in areas like where I live now. Because yes, I know, last time around pretty much every riding outside of the old city of Toronto voted for Ford. But there is a massive Chinese population in the northeastern part of the city and I wonder if having a Chinese-Canadian candidate would make a difference... It's not like everyone votes along ethnic lines, but it's probably likely to be a factor to some people. Plus, she is just generally awesome.

Young Geoffrey, adolescently cynical?

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

I dunno. I've become so disenchanted with the NDP, that I fear even Olivia Chow would "compromise" her way into continuing the neo-con destruction, albeit probably with a slightly more human face.

The older I get, the more I despair of our ostensible democracy.

But if you see Chow making a difference, maybe I won't give up on it just yet.

[sabotabby]

The NDP's neoliberal, but I have this naïve faith that they'll at least make some concessions to the concept of civilization. That's how low we've sunk; we're not considering what kind of civilization to have, but whether it's justifiable to have one at all.

I do like Chow, though. She's better than most.

[smhwpf.livejournal.com]

I love the fact that his defence is that he was in a drunken stupor at the time.

Will he actually soldier on to the election? Could the Tories throw him out as their candidate? (Of course he could still stand as Independent Crackhead Wifebeater and nicely split their vote...)

While it would be great if he was forced to resign, it would be really cool if he brought down the Toronto Tory party with him. So long as he didn't actually bring down Toronto with him.

[sabotabby]

I think he's actually going to run. He's like a honey badger; he just don't give a fuck.

So on a municipal level, we don't actually have party politics (which means, in theory, the possibility of genuinely decent mayors, and we have had a few). Ford is slightly unusual in his strong ties to the provincial and federal Tories, and Dougie is going to run with them provincially, but from their point of view, they can cut ties. Whether anyone buys that, with the myriad pictures of Harper, Hudak, and Ford partying together, will be a different story. (Spoiler: Yes. Canadians are stupid.)

Miller, our previous mayor, had ties to the NDP, but they were nowhere near that obvious. If Chow runs (and I hope she does) the NDP connection will be inescapable, but that's actually to her favour in Toronto.

I'm actually hoping his antics deal catastrophic damage to the provincial and federal Tories. Unfortunately, the popular reading is that he's proving to be a distraction from an expense scandal involving three Conservative senators.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

Robbo was a dealer too, wasn't he?

Hope this goes on and on. Last thing to hope for now is a quick and civilized resolution.

[sabotabby]

I don't think so. Doug dealt, Randy enforced (and probably dealt), and Rob used.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

ah, right it was doug.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

"I didn't mention this before because I spend so much time blackout drunk."

[sabotabby]

This was actually my favourite bit.

[radiumhead.livejournal.com]

Can you give me a list of Ford's greatest hits?

[metalana.livejournal.com]

Greatest Hits? There have been so many Rob Ford scandals, people keep track on spreadsheets and stuff. Try:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AhpNgYjOr8FzdGhZNVFocUhERUxzRGJBMFBtVDZHaUE
http://robfordfiles.com/

And as the dirt comes out, reporters go back to previous seemly-innocent or small incidents to find more connections.

[sabotabby]

There are a whole bunch around. metalana's is pretty thorough, I think.

[flummoxicated.livejournal.com]

[sabotabby]

Yes.

P.S. Did you see the Daily Show?

[flummoxicated.livejournal.com]

I'm a couple days behind - I saw he covered this though, so I'm looking forward to seeing it.

[sabotabby]

It's epic.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

I just googled it and oh my god

that was the best possible use of those three and a half minutes of my life

[coconuthead.livejournal.com]

Does "I'm sorry, I was really drunk at the time" work as an excuse in Canada?

[franklanguage.livejournal.com]

I guess so!

[kryss-labryn.livejournal.com]

Well, to be fair, it was more like, "Whatevs, I was really drunk at the time."

I got to hear the first reaction from him on the way into work (the "Yeah, I probably did but I don't remember the details because I was in one of my drunken stupors" one--also the one with "Lol u guys totally didn't ask the right questions back in May haha" and "It's in the past so let's just move on"), and then the much more contrite, obviously scripted statement while I was making a Timmy's run on my break. The disparity between the two was pretty hilarious, and while I abhor "American-style mud-slinging" in politics, come election time, I hope the other candidates sling the shit outta that first one lol.

[sabotabby]

Not for TTC workers and civil servants, according to Ford.

For him, certainly, but he's above the law in general.

[ironed_orchid]

It's one of those situations that I really enjoy in fiction where both sides are really evil and you are rooting for them both to destroy each other in the most bombastic possible explosion.

This is the outcome I hope for, as long as the explosion in this case is metaphorical and mostly fucks up the Tories.

[sabotabby]

I don't think it harms anyone else, other than the city in general so long as he's mayor and doing stuff as mayor. I'm actually hoping it draws some of the moderates who originally supported him in, because I want those fuckers gone too.

Politically speaking, that is. It certainly harms his family.

[kryss-labryn.livejournal.com]

Ha ha ha, I had a really angry guy call in the other night because he couldn't get online (doin' tech support now), and the Rob Ford video was streaming live and he was missing it. Managed to divert him from how awful the company I do tech support for is* into a rant on how awful Rob Ford is for over five minutes while I ran tests (that unfortunately take forever) and got the info I needed sorted out. I lol-ed and thought of you. Well, actually, I lol-ed and told him I had a friend in Toronto who was keeping us all apprised of the latest Ford hilarity and, yes, okay, so all politicians seem to be inherently corrupt; but wow was Ford bad at it ha ha.

*At one point he asked how I could live with myself or sleep at night, working for them, considering how awful the company supposedly was, and told me I should kill myself. I had to mute him then so he couldn't hear me laughing at him. He really was really mad, and it was pretty hilarious.**

**Not that being unable to get the service one is paying for is somehow funny; just that actually telling someone they should kill themselves for being employed by one particular cable company over another is inherently laughable and I found it hilarious. Dude I am not killing babies or skinning puppies alive; I am just trying to get people's connection issues fixed. Obviously I should GDIAF. LOL.

[sabotabby]

Wow. Just—abusing tech support is not fucking cool. I've been guilty of getting angry myself, but it's at the company not the person.

[kryss-labryn.livejournal.com]

I honestly and sincerely found it hilarious. He was really mad at the company, though, and largely not at me, except for the bit where I did something at my end that had a reasonable chance of fixing his issue and his modem didn't want to log back on after it rebooted; at that point he was all "What did you do? What did YOU do?! At least it was working before!" --Except it wasn't, which is why he called in in the first place, and there was a larger issue going on, because if you turn something off and then it doesn't want to turn back on again, then, dude, there is a problem with the machine, no matter what machine that is.. Meh. He didn't want a tech to come out and fix it and he largely didn't want to have the issue fixed--he mainly wanted to rant at the eeeevul tech company while broadcasting the call to his ham friends. Anyone who actually wants the issue fixed, in my experience, is willing to do a little basic trouble-shooting and to work with the tech to sort it out. People who call up because they can't get online and refuse to so much as reboot a device I can't get hold of until they do, to try and sort it out for them, in my opinion, less want the issue actually solved and more want a magic fairy to wave her wand and make all their troubles magically disappear. Because people who respond to "Okay, I think I have an idea of what's going on here and if you can help me do a bit of testing then I think we can pin it down and sort it out for you" with "Jesus how much do I have to do to get this stupid piece of shit to work!! I don't want to fiddle around with this thing. Just fix it!!" are probably the same sort of people who answer the doctor's questions like "where does it hurt?" with "I don't know. You're the doctor. You figure it out!"

Bleah. I had a guy shortly after I started who was furious that his connection wouldn't work--about 10+ times a day he'd lose his Internet and have to go and "unplug" it--by which he meant "disconnect the ethernet cable between the modem and his computer and then plug it in again" because somewhere along the line he got the idea that interrupting his data feed would somehow be a good thing. Except of course he didn't know that that was what he was doing; someone just told him that that would fix it (or more likely, he misunderstood them), except it didn't, and BOY was he mad about it. So I asked him if he'd tried actually unplugging the electricity, which he not only had not done, he flat-out refused to do on the grounds that he wasn't an electrician and why would he mess with the wiring?!

I would like to point out at this point that the modems are not hard-wired into the walls; they have a power plug. Just like a toaster. BETTER CALL AN ELECTRICIAN THEN. *Eyeroll*

I ended up transferring him to a supervisor because he was insisting, and because wtf else was I supposed to do with him? The error code I was getting, and from what he was telling me, meant that if he'd just unplugged the bloody thing for ten seconds it would have been working again, but he flat-out refused to and got really angry when I tried to insist that that was the fix.

Meh. The last time I did tech support, back in BC, I'd run into these people at the grocery store and stuff. Hell, thanks to the fucking phone book printing our address when we told them not to, I had the occasional belligerent customer show up at the fucking house. Here, the worst thing that will happen is that someone I don't know and will never meet might get mad and yell at me. Heck, they might even make a complaint, at which point the recording of the call will be listened to and, since I am polite and helpful ALL of the time, nothing bad will happen to me. Back in BC, I had to worry about angry customers showing up at my home with guns. Some idiot tells me I should kill myself because he doesn't like the company that's--indirectly, even--employing me?

Seriously, that is HILARIOUS. :D

[howlin-wolf-66.livejournal.com]

I guess one of the ways to know that you've REALLY screwed up as mayor is when your deeds go viral, and thus international, huh?!

Meaning to say that before this all hit, I had no idea who he was... and now, I'll never forget his name.

[sabotabby]

He's really put my city on the map.

[jvmatucha.livejournal.com]

Aaaaaand now he's getting well known in 'Murica! :D

[sabotabby]

That's blocked but I found it on YouTube; really nice.

[misslynx.livejournal.com]

his other head, Dougie, goes on the attack, calling for police chief Bill Blair to step down.

Well, of course! Clearly, saying publicly that they have a video of the mayor committing a crime was an inexcusable violation of proper police procedure. Doesn't Blair know that the correct procedure in the case of people in high places committing crimes is to institute a massive cover-up? Clearly, he's not really qualified for his job!

[sabotabby]

The most hilarious bit is that he did cover it up. Just not well enough.