Today we had the swearing-in ceremony of our new Mayor, Rob Ford, or as Eye magazine aptly dubbed him, the night-mayor. Say it out loud. Get it?
In downtown Toronto, where I live, few people voted for this guy.
Check out the map on who voted for him, and who voted for his more progressive opponent. The purple bits? That's downtown. Amalgamation sucks!
I could go into particular policy issues, but I don't want to get all pedantic here. Suffice it to say, he's bad in all the ways a politician is bad:
Sports hooligan-like partisanship. Favours wedge issues over real dialogue. Bullies to mask his shortcomings. Panders to lowest common denominator.
It's a depressing day, but it is, after all the era of lauding vacuous bullies. And people elect mascots, don't they?
The most inadvertently hilarious moment of the day? He asked fellow mascot, hockey commentator and self-described pit-bull Don "Grapes" Cherry to address council.
He speech started with this:
Actually, I'm wearing pink for al the pinkos out there that ride bicycles and everything.
And ended with "Put that in your pipe, you left wing kooks." Read the full speech here.
Freaking awesome! I loves me a good villain! As much as I dread the next 4 years, I also can't wait for the comedy and the push-back, the INDUSTRY that will arise from the Rob Ford backlash.
Now who's making the "Bike-Riding Pinko" T-shirts for mass consumption?
My yiddish expression for the 7th night of Chanukah? (This one is to make my fellow downtowners feel better).
If all men pulled in one direction, the world would topple over. Ven alleh mentshen zollen tsien oif ain zeit, volt zich di velt ibergekert.
