SO YOU HAVE SMOKED CRACK!

An old friend who is a peer-age co-worker and happens to share similar political views as I do, also happens to be much more obsessed with the Excited States of America’s political activities than our Canadian politics, because he says that Canadian politics are bland, vanilla, boring, blah, blah, blah, in comparison to the old US of A’s.


Now, granted, they’ve got some interesting stuff going on down there, what with the Republican Party shutting down the government recently and the whole Obamacare thing and then there’s their love of guns and the resulting mass shootings etc.; oh…wait…sorry...”Guns don’t shoot people; people shoot people” yada, yada, yada, (but that’s a debate for another time), so it’s hard not to look over the 49th Parallel fence to see what’s happening in the next door neighbour’s yard, you know? But that was before November 5, 2013, that is.

I will disagree with him completely when he says that politics in Canada are boring and especially on a day when three Canadian Conservative Senators, Patrick Brazeau, Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin were suspended from the Senate without pay or the use of Senate office resources, over allegations of “gross negligence” related to their expense claims, for the remainder of the current parliamentary session, which ends in 2015.

The unprecedented suspensions of the three Senators was overshadowed, if you can imagine any other news overshadowing this kind of action, by Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s bombshell admission that he, in fact, HAD “smoked crack cocaine “about a year ago” and had been lying about the whole sordid affair ever since an alleged video of him smoking crack first came to light months ago.

But in his typical Rob Fordian confrontational style he said, “Yes, I have smoked crack cocaine. But I am not an addict. Have I tried it? Probably…in one of my drunken stupors.” Oh, oh…“drunken stupor”…okay, then…when you put it like that, you know, everything’s better because you were in a drunken stupor at the time and who doesn’t do weird and wacky stuff when they’re in a drunken stupor? That makes all the difference in world, eh? All better now.

As if that admission wasn’t completely lame enough he goes on to say that, “I’ve made mistakes but I love my job, I love this city, I love saving the taxpayer’s money and I love being Mayor.” Isn’t that special? And he continues…”For the sake of the taxpayers…we must get back to work immediately…I was elected to do a job and that’s exactly what I’m going to continue doing.” So, you know, shuddup about it already…I’ve already said I made some drunken stupor mistakes…so…are we good? Can we move on? No? What’s the problem?

Ford said he’d work to regain the trust of Toronto residents and that they’d “have a choice to make” in next year’s municipal elections. Only Rob Ford could take an admission of this magnitude and turn it into a campaign pledge! If you Googled “audacity” whose face do you think would come up? Me too.

Before we continue, I will admit to you that I know a little bit about drunken stupors first hand and there are things that have occurred in said stuporous states that maybe I wouldn’t easily admit to either, but, I also don’t think I’m in the minority there…AND, here’s the kicker, I am not the Mayor of the fourth largest city in North America behind only Mexico City, New York City and Los Angeles who has been lying to his 2.8 million constituents for the past six months.

Yes, we Canadians probably cover eighty times as much United States news as they’d ever cover of ours but Rob Ford has changed a lot of that with a few “mistakes” and I’m thinking that the three scandal-ridden Canadian Conservative Senators, Brazeau, Duffy and Wallin, may be just a wee bit happy that he’s stolen some of their contemptuous thunder this time around.



“It is the public scandal that offends; to sin in secret is no sin at all.”- Molière.