Well, no longer, good people. The times, they done changed, just like Bob Dylan warned us they would, lo those many years ago. These days, I'd be barred from office for the simple reason that my copious drinking and fucking hasn't resulted in a lengthy arrest record. Damn my ability to handle my high. It keeps holding me back.
Meet Sheboygan, Wisconsin mayor Bob Ryan. Mayor Ryan clearly knows how to have a good time.
Mayor Bob Ryan has big plans for this little city. He wants to dredge the Sheboygan River to lure bigger recreational boats, build a green corporate park and bring high-end housing to the sleepy downtown.Because he likes to have a good time, and because Wisconsin is historically a hotbed of populist nonsense, there is a drive to recall him which seems unlikely to succeed.
But before he gets to any of that he has to deal with a problem. Mr. Ryan is an alcoholic, and since taking office two years ago, he has fallen off the wagon four times. His sobriety slip-ups, including a bar fight, have been documented in a police report and a YouTube video, making this small-city mayor the butt of late-night television jokes and international news coverage.
(...)
In his office lined with photos of his favorite Green Bay Packers, the 48-year-old said he has been a binge drinker since he was 12. At 42, he concluded he was an alcoholic and entered a 12-step recovery program.
He sold his oil distribution business a couple of years after he ran successfully for city council in 2006 and, even though he was in a lot of bars while he campaigned, he said the discipline and focus of the election was good for his sobriety. But after the race "it was all kind of stored up," he said.
One night, after becoming mayor in April 2009, he went drinking with the city's human resources director, who later alleged he made a pass at her. After he fired her a few months later, she sued and eventually won a settlement from the city's insurance company for $310,000. The mayor admitted no wrongdoing.
That was followed by an off-color declaration about his sister-in-law at Brennan's in July of 2009 that was filmed and posted on YouTube. The incident was incorporated into one of Jay Leno's monologues. Mr. Ryan apologized and publicly admitted he had a drinking problem. In July 2010, he was seen drinking at a local bar. And then, this past July, he went on a three-day bender culminating in a bar fight. When police arrived, his watch had been stolen and he was sitting quietly on a curb.
"It wasn't good," he said.
As my long-time readers know, I forcefully reject populist horseshit notions like recalls because they serve only to absolve voters of their own bad decisions. The greatness of the American system of seperation of powers is that it allows other branches of government to remove the executive, but only for truly egregious conduct. Recalls mean that elections are never final, the voters never have to really make up their minds, and the much celebrated "permanent campaign" mentality that has destroyed government is cemented.
Moreover, recall serves to absolve legislators of their constitutional, if difficult and often unpopular, responsibility to check the executive. They can hide behind meaningless "will of the people" horseshit rhetoic that the very idea of impeachment was created to circumvent. Indeed, the concept of a republic is built around the fact that governing is hard and the people are not infrequently very stupid. There are no good reasons for recall that impeachment doesn't address.
Populism is fantastic is you're beheading Louis XIV or storming the fucking Winter Palace, neither of which ended particularly well. Otherwise, it's just another example of retarded and irresponsible voters getting played by demagogues and scumbag spin doctors.
But if the dice don't roll Bob Ryan's way in Wisconsin, he can always move to Toronto and run for mayor here. Rob Ford was elected Last October, even though it was widely known that his love of booze has led to him being in handcuffs more often since 1991 than Axl Rose. Having said that, Hizzoner currently cuts a more slender figure than the aforementioned Mr. Rose.
Among Ford's more celebrated sins was driving drunk, as a foreign national, with marijuana on his person in downright medieval jurisdictions, like Florida. He was also ejected from a hockey game for drunkenly attempting to provoke violence.
The mayor's drunken antics are known far and wide, and they didn'y stop him from being elected. Neither, for the record, did his hallucinatory campaign promise to "stop the gravy train" by cutting taxes and fees in a huge way, while maintaining and expanding social services and subway construction, and paying for it by cutting essentially $75,000 in gardening fees at City Hall.
One presumes that he did all of that shit stone-sober, which presumes that the city of Toronto is either drunk, stupid or both. Which we apparently are. Ford won the mayorality with nearly half the vote in field of a half dozen serious candidates. What passes for the conservative movemement these days remains four-square behind Ford because the he embodies everything the modern conservative movement is built upon - drunken bellicosity, stupidity, and a proud ignorance of the laws of mathematics. They see him as a badass in the face of the godless liberal Intelligenstia.
Until, of course, he isn't. When he's confronted as something as awful and menacing as an unfunny 60 year old woman in a Xena suit and a plastic sword, he stopsbeing a badass pretty quickly.
Mayor Rob Ford had a rough start to the week.Look, I don't doubt that Rob has had his share of death threats. But I have my suspicions that none of them involved female seniors with professional camera crews. I'm a cynical prick that way.
He called 911 after being accosted outside his Etobicoke home around 8 a.m. on Monday as he was leaving for a council meeting at City Hall.
The attackers turned out to be from the CBC comedy show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, which specializes in catching politicians unaware. By the time police arrived, the TV crew and Ford had gone.
According to a neighbour, a woman brandishing a microphone jumped out of a dark blue Jeep and ran yelling toward Ford’s driveway with a cameraman in tow.
The woman was 22 Minutes alumna Mary Walsh, in character as her alter ego Marg Delahunty and dressed outlandishly as Marg, Warrior Princess, CBC spokesman Chris Ball confirmed.
Ford, who has received death threats in recent months, was furious at the ambush, saying he had no idea who was coming at him.
But let's look at what the "fair and balanced" media has to say about all of this, shall we?
Hackish 14 year-old Brian Lilley has Sun Media resident dickhead Mark Bonokowski admit that he's ambushed politicians at home .. but never as a prank. Which is apparently important, because your odds of being assissinated by a sixty-year old woman with a Xenu suit, a plastic sword and a camera crew are much greater than being murdered by a middle-aged white guy in black clothes, coke-bottle glasses, a political agenda and a creepy mustache. Look at your fucking history, people!
Again, Lilley and Bonokowski apparently have no issue with the media ambushing folks at home. Bonokowski admits to doing it himself, while simeltaneously condeming it. And neither has mentioned The O'Reilly Factor - which is Sun News' operational model - regularly doing exactly the same thing.
However, I can see how Rob Ford, Brian Lilley and Mark Bonokowski missed the joke, because I did, too. This Hour Has 22 Minutes has never been funny, and the CBC has lacked a sense of humour since the Kids in the Hall went off the air.
Having said that, the incredibly selective "conservative" outrage machine is a fucking scream. Most of these assholes seems to have stopped even knowing when they were lying years ago. They soak their fucking panties over Bill O'Reilly's intern and James O'Keefe, but can't contain their indignance over someone who calls herself "Marg, Warrior Princess" on a show that no one watches.
Look, Mary Walsh - or anyone on her fucking show - wouldn't know a joke if it bent them over and stuffed a vodka bottle in their asses. But in making allegedly conservative dickheads twist themselves into hypocritical pretzels of almost awesome stupidity, they made this sorry spectacle one of the funniest goddamned things I've ever seen.
And it convinces me that we need someone like Bob Ryan as mayor. Our pal Bob would just punch Xenu in the side of the head, admit he was drunk, and not rely on a bunch of journalistic hacks and amatuer crybaby fucking bloggers to clean up his mess.
If nothing else, Bob Ryan carries with him a sense of personal responsibility that Rob Ford, Sun News and 99% of the asshole blogosphere never will. At least he's ashamed of being a lout, and I think we all need more of that.
Video ruthlessly ripped off from Blazing Cat Fur
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