PT6A posted:

I'm glad to see this thread has grown up a little since Jim Flaherty died.

Cultural Imperial posted:

Haha I hope that fat gently caress died in excrciating pain

Cultural Imperial posted:

Jim flaherty was a worthless moron and deserved to die in pain. gently caress him

CLAM DOWN posted:

Countless numbers of good, kind, selfless, and otherwise completely healthy people die to cancer. Shed a tear for those people, not that piece of poo poo fat gently caress ex mayor.

PT6A posted:

We could do both and feel sad when anyone dies!

Vintersorg posted:

Rob Ford sucked.

E: Someone write down a eulogy on things he did that sucked.

Moist von Lipwig posted:

THE DEATH OF ROB FORD: NOTES ON THE PASSING OF A CANADIAN MONSTER.... HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA.... BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE MAYOR.

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."
---Revelation 18:2

Rob Ford is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even John Tory the unhappy mayor who replaced Ford and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout.

I have had my own bloody relationship with Ford for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Ford had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Ford all their lives. My mother hates Ford, my son hates Ford, I hate Ford, and this hatred has brought us together.

Ford laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said, "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."

It was Rob Ford who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Ford was politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.

That was Ford's style -- and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.

Ford was a bouyant man, and he should have been buried at sea. These come in at least two styles, however, and Ford's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead mayor's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 10 kilometers off the coast and at least 100 kilometers east of Sault Ste Marie, so the corpse could never wash up on Canadian soil in any recognizable form.

The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the Mayor of Toronto. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable -- some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Ford might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.

It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.

If the right people had been in charge of Ford's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the lake just south of Hamilton. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a mayor. Ford was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by John Tory -- but I have written worse things about Ford, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Rob Ford was an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Gravy Train can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him -- except maybe the Suburbanist Etobicoans, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Ford to slither into City Hall in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-Torontonian, so much like William Lyon Mackenzie, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Ford clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Ford's meteoric rise from the alleyway to the councilship in six quick years would never have happened if twitter had come along 5 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "i have plenty to eat at home" speech in 2013 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local newspapers. When Ford finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 2014 mayoral campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard conservative voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Ford had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Ford lost an election.

Ford had no friends except his brother, Doug Ford and Doug Holyday (and they both deserted him). It was Holyday's shameless exit in 2014 that led directly to Ford's downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Holyday gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director's ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Toronto.

Holyday was Ford's right flank, and when he left, Ford knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.

For Ford, the loss of Holyday led inevitably to the disaster of Crackgate. It meant hiring a Deputy Mayor -- who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named Norm Kelly, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Ford leaned on him. Norm Kelly panicked and fingered Gawker, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Ford, who was trapped like a rat by Gawker's relentless, vengeful social media blitz and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.

That is Crackgate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Ford walked free and lived to clear his name.

Ford liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the Mayor does it, it can't be illegal."

Ford's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives -- whether you're me or Justin Trudeau or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Rob Ford was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

He has poisoned our water forever. Ford will be remembered as a classic case of a dumb man making GBS threads in his own nest. But he also poo poo in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Mayorship of Toronto, by fleeing the office like a diseased cur, Rob Ford broke the heart of the Torontonian Dream.

ZShakespeare posted:

rip fat trump

Badger of Basra posted:

So am I reading these stories wrong or did Rob Ford literally have fat cancer?

Badger of Basra posted:

So am I reading these stories wrong or did Rob Ford literally have fat cancer?

MonsieurChoc posted:

All this talk of fat cancer is scaring the poo poo out of me.

Vintersorg posted:

Workout and take care of yourself.

Cultural Imperial posted:

maybe even you can get a job as health minister

MonsieurChoc posted:

I've been trying to lose weight for years and haven't managed to do it. Saying something stupid like that won't magically solve it.

MonsieurChoc posted:

I've been trying to lose weight for years and haven't managed to do it. Saying something stupid like that won't magically solve it.

Cultural Imperial posted:

If you have dual citizenship, don't bother getting in contact with the Canadian Government because the francophone rear end in a top hat working the emergency desk has got better poo poo to do than repatriate your anglo rear end

Canadian Foreign Service officers are literally human garbage and they make the CBSA appear polite

PT6A posted:

MonsieurChoc posted:

I've been trying to lose weight for years and haven't managed to do it. Saying something stupid like that won't magically solve it.

brucio posted:

You're talking about francophones, not FSOs. And FSOs will be overwhelmingly francophones due to their bilingual advantage.

jm20 posted:

You don't need to lose weight, just don't get cancer.

PK loving SUBBAN posted:

For real though I'd worry more about genetics than weight. Does cancer run in your family? If not, go for the gusto.