Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s Latest Video Is Not Hilarious, It’s Just Pathetic

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, who recently admitted to smoking crack, now faces a new controversy:

Rob Ford , the mayor of Canada’s largest city, has been caught on video in an impaired rant saying he is going to kill someone and “rip his f—ing throat out.”

Ford slurs his words as he staggers around an unknown dining room, apparently high, ranting gibberish and gesticulating wildly.

“I’m gonna kill that f—ing guy. I’m telling you, it’s first-degree murder,” Ford rages as someone in the room secretly uses a cellphone to film the chief magistrate’s addled tirade.

Moments after the Star published the video online, Ford emerged from his office and apologized.

“The Toronto Star just released a video that I was very, very inebriated.

“All I can say is, again, I’ve made mistakes. I just wanted to come out and tell you I saw a video. It’s extremely embarrassing. The whole world’s going to see it. You know what? I don’t have a problem with that.”

“I hope none of you have ever or will ever be in that state. Obviously, I was extremely, extremely inebriated.”

At this point, I’ve really got to say that we’re at the point that laughing at Mayor Ford may not be the right reaction. He’s obviously a man with serious addiction problems at the very least. One can only hope that he gets helps for those issues before things end tragically.

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Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. Franklin says:

    Media is going to make him a celebrity over all this. If he can get some help for his most obvious problem, he’ll do fine.

  2. Rob Ford has hurt a lot of people in his time in office. A LOT. I have no sympathy.

  3. @Christopher Bowen:

    Maybe not so much sympathy on my part, just the hope that he gets he heck out of offiice and ges the help he needs.

  4. @Doug Mataconis: I don’t care how he gets out of office at this point. But I felt that way before the crack video dropped.

  5. OzarkHillbilly says:

    “All I can say is, again, I’ve made mistakes. I just wanted to come out and tell you I saw a video. It’s extremely embarrassing. The whole world’s going to see it. You know what? I don’t have a problem with that.”

    Hence we come to the nut of everybody else’s problem with him.

  6. Dave Schuler says:

    The only reason this is making the news here at all is that he’s Canadian. We expect such antics from our own pols but a Canadian politician doing it makes it a “man bites dog” story. There’ve been worse from politicians here in the States. Not only was it not big news, they’ve gone on to future offices.

  7. Neil Hudelson says:

    @Dave Schuler:

    Marion Barry seems to be the most apt comparison. It seems to me he got a LOT of publicity out of it, and made the news quite often.

    While Barry did ultimately regain his old job, I don’t know if I would consider that the norm.

    (Although with you being from Illinois, I have a feeling you have a much bigger sample of local pols that are worse than Ford.)

  8. grumpy realist says:

    @Neil Hudelson: We got the Blago….usually the weasels remain down at the alderman level. Although we’ve been managing to get rid of quite of them, recently.