Love Him Or Hate Him, It’s A Sad Day For Rob Ford & Family

A Brief Comment from Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper

God bless us, he loved being mayor of Canada’s largest city and the third largest city in North America.

So much so that Rob Ford would continue to weather any amount of shame and humiliation through the last couple of years of outing his drug and alcoholic addictions, his palling around with nefarious individuals in the grey areas of the law, and so many other antics that made him a butt of late night talk show hosts across the world.

Rob Ford

As everyone who is not totally cut off by ear-bug bullshit must know by now, Rob Ford – diagnosed with an abdominal tumor earlier this second week in September that is serious and may be cancerous – bowed out of Toronto, Ontario’s mayoralty race and has left the challenge of ‘Ford Nation’ holding the mayor’s seat this fall to his loyal brother Doug.

I’ll be honest here. I never cared for the Ford agenda, which calls for cutting and taxes along with gutting more government services that so curiously are there to help some of the very recent immigrant and lower-income people that Ford has so successfully lured in support of his neo-con, post Mike Harris era nation.

But still in all, this is not the way you want to see Rob Ford go out, assuming he might go on to lose this October’s mayoralty race to challengers John Tory and Olivia Chow. One would hope that his agenda would get a full and open airing n candidate debates, etc. without this tragedy of a serious health setback and his brother taking his place as the ‘Ford Nation’s’ candidate.

One wonders what the late night comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and others, who have made a cottage industry out of telling jokes about Rob Ford, will say now, if anything. These jokesters tend to say noting when things go dour. They move on to another slap-happy target because most of the empty headed idiots who are drawn to them can’t handle real life and the pain it often brings.

One of the very few American journalists who expressed reluctance to do the jokes on the MSNBC show she co-hosts on Morning Joe has been Mika Brzesinski (hope I spelled her last name right as her father was a secretary of state under the former U.S. president Jimmy Carter). She was reluctant to join in the crazy reports on Rob Ford other so-called news types reported across the U.S. because, as she said in so many words, ‘this man, with his addiction and weight problems needs help and this is not going to come to a good end.’

Mika, God bless her for being one of the few news commentators out, appears to be right. It doesn’t seem to be coming to much of a good end for this guy, whether we like his politics or not.

There is no joke that could ever be approprate for Rob Ford and his family now. Regardless of how we feel about his brand of politics, he deserves our best wishes and compassion as he faces what is obviously a potentially fatal health challenge.

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