Wildly Inaccurate Allegations....

What is there about staid old Toronto that attracts highly unusual individual extrovert-introverts to the mayoralty? The city striving to shed its reputation as Toronto the Good?

That someone of the batty ilk of Mel Lastman, a raucous entrepreneur with a string of Bad Boy appliance stores selling cheap, sub-grade home appliances, a man with a penchant for self-promotion and a sense of inappropriately outrageous attention-getting hijinks would be followed soon afterward by a jolly, rolly-polly champion of fiscal conservatism backed by socially polarizing charitable work balanced against creepy malfunction speaks volumes of something.

We just can't figure out what it might be.

The bad-publicity-averse, but invariably-attracting mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, hit the big time on his carousel-rounds. Even Slate writers are musing about what makes the man tick and then tock and then clock into a heap of problems that any self-respecting mayor of any self-respecting town would prefer to avoid. This time around the cow-pie-prone mayor hit the jackpot.

And there's little doubt his loyal supporters are groaning in frustrated vexation over the man who keeps putting his foot into those cow-pies. Another term in office, Mayor Ford? Doubt it. Consorting with street-crime-level drug dealers is not the kind of activity one usually connects with big-town mayors.

And Toronto is striving to offer that status for itself, a big-time player among the heavies on the international scene. There's New York, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris, London, Beijing, Moscow - and hello there, Toronto! Toronto the Good suddenly transformed into Toronto the Bad, with its mayor studying the history of Marion Berry who got re-elected despite his penchant for crack cocaine.

And that was in the capital of the most powerful country on Earth.

Take that and smoke it in your glass pipe.

At least Mayor Ford proved that he's no racist, even if it has been bruited about that he's a tad homophobic. The tawdry, sex-obsessed spectacles on show at Gay Pride parades aren't his cup of tea, but the underworld of shady drug paraphernalia and drug-gang enterprise with Somali dealers is kind of intriguing, obviously. All in the name of serving all the people all the time, some better than others, but getting to know them all.

Fooling around with marijuana is one thing, cocaine use ticks it up a notch.

Mayor Ford admires enterprise, and it was an enterprising move on the part of a dealer to surreptitiously video the mayor smoking up in good and trusted company on the theory that honour exists among blackguards, that has landed him in this dungheap of controversy. So, really, what you see is what you get, with Mayor Ford. Blond and buxom, eyebrow-battingraising and sexily controversial. Smiling, happy, glad to be with friends.

One of whom was anxious to make big bucks out of that video, but ended up feeding a frenzy of gawkers eager to see the snippets that easily identified the man who vowed to do things differently, his way, just like Frank Sinatra who did things his way, snorting cocaine, ravishing women with his voice, and running with the mobsters. Oh, gee, Rob Ford is a fambly man, and some of those little enticements wouldn't go well with his familial obligations.




So he's settled for what he could manage, only it seems he managed these affairs oblivious to the complicating consequences. He's just a spectacularly nice guy with a mission left unaccomplished when life got excitingly ahead of him.