Since last I noted it, and the accusations and admissions of public drunkenness, crack use while drunk, public urination etc. the Mayor of Toronto has been accused of bullying staff members, sexually harassing staff members and others, and physical abuse of his wife.
Under the law he remains mayor, but in two meetings the Toronto City Council took away most of his mayoral powers. He attended the second of those meetings, on Monday, and put on a show on live television. It was described in a National Post column by Andrew Coyne:
"Something snapped at Toronto City Council Monday afternoon, and it wasn’t just Rob Ford’s cerebral cortex. Watching the mayor and his brother strutting about the council chamber — ignoring the Speaker, taunting other councillors, shouting down city officials, screaming insults at spectators, the whole carried out with an air of anarchic glee — was to sense the last tether connecting our politics to some sort of civilized norms breaking under the strain. We are adrift now, floating wildly, with no idea of where we will end up.
At one point the mayor engaged in an extended pantomime of a drunk driver, directed at a councillor who had been cautioned by police. At another, racing about the chamber — literally sprinting — he ploughed into another councillor, knocking her to the floor, apparently in his haste to join the apprehended brawl then under way between his brother and members of the public gallery.
To add to the general note of menace, the mayor was seen directing his personal driver/security guard, who for some reason was allowed onto the chamber floor, to videotape certain of the spectators who had displeased him. Given the services his last driver, the alleged extortionist Sandro Lisi, is accused of performing, it was an altogether chilling moment."
Ford told Council that it had "invaded Kuwait" with its action, that is forced a war, which he said he will wage in the next election. Some observers (at least last week) consider that he could well win that election next year, because of the suburban voters of his base, and the rabid rightward swing it represents.
But evidence that Ford has become politically toxic is suggested in this story in the Toronto Globe and Mail which suggests that his own party may join with Liberals on a provincial level to change the law to make it possible for Ford to be removed from office.
Still, as Coyne noted:
"If it is unclear where we are headed, it is clear as day how we got here. With each passing day, the Fords have been dragging the standards we expect of public officials deeper and deeper into the muck, each past act of public or private depravity somehow normalized by the next, worse offence. It is as if, knowing the evidence cannot exonerate the mayor, they and their apologists have decided to annihilate our very ability to judge the evidence."
Which prompts several thoughts about the U.S. First, standards have been driven so far into the muck here that it takes something like this elsewhere to focus the danger. Second, while Canada may have been following the U.S. Tea Party lead, this episode looks a little too much like coming attractions for the U.S.
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