Canada garners dubious award but we'll still respect you in the morning

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is the runaway winner.

Talking Points Memo [TPM] "is pleased to announce the winners of the Seventh Annual Golden Dukes recognizing the year's best purveyors of public corruption, outlandish behavior and The Crazy.

The awards are named in honor of former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who epitomizes the iconic modern scandal."
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A few comments from the judges:

"Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker.

Best Scandal -- General Interest

Rob Ford

The Golden Dukes normally leave us no choice but to wallow in national self-abnegation, so it's an unexpected treat when another country comes along and offers us an opportunity to direct our aggressive impulses outward — especially when that country is as sweet and unoffending as our friendly neighbor to the north. Rob Ford is a truly world-class entertainer. He is the Wayne Gretzky of scandalous squalor. Eww-factor sex, hard drug use, spectacular inebriation (including citing drunken stupors as justification for heroin snorting and crack smoking), racial and gender bigotry, all-around grossness — what doesn't this scandal have? Well, it doesn't have much in the way of pecuniary greed and financial manipulation — but maybe that's a feature, not a bug. Thanks, Canada! You've given us something to strive for: an affordable, single-payer scandal.

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Susie Bright is a feminist sex writer and Editor at Large at Audible.com

Best Scandal General Interest

Rob Ford

The Golden Dukes competition, so proud in its diversity, a rainbow spectrum of pig slop, is faced with an unprecedented challenge this year: Can one chutspenik, a single inchoate slob, sweep it all?

Mayor Rob Ford, white courtesy telephone. Your crack dealer wants his dignity back.

The metropolis of Toronto, until 2013 best known for circumspection rather than corruption — has entered the world stage “in a drunken stupor” that sums up everything degrading about the affluenza society.

Rob Ford, poor little rich boy. Poor little sexist homophobic racist labor-hating city-plundering toadying fool. Why can't Bobby get any respect?

No one asked the right question, as Rob expertly pointed out to reporters. The question isn't how many crimes or how many times — it's how did Robbie's now-mortified corporate sponsors ever pick this man-child to represent them, a global village idiot who has rewritten the book on cognitive dissonance?

I'm a former loving resident of Canada, so it's not misguided patriotism on my behalf. What's so weird about Ford, is that he's the Macy's Parade balloon of everything cringeworthy about American Tea Party exceptionalism, of deep-fried bigotry and prickery that we see so commonly inside U.S. borders.

When we found out Ford's favorite place to pull a DUI was Florida, it all made sense, didn't it? This one man makes "Girls Gone Wild" look like a nunnery.

Best Scandal -- Sex and Generalized Carnality

Rob Ford

Rob Ford committed one mistake among his peers: they were quite willing to accept any manner of intoxication. Just like British MPs asked if they're drunk on power or just plain drunk -- Ford is a proud product of the Commonwealth.

But cunnilingus? That isn't cricket.

By bragging on TV that he had all the pussy he could eat at home, Ford scored some unintentional clit points, at his peril. In denying corruption and harassment charges, he essentially admitted he likes to go down on women, that he understands what gets women off, and sexualized his First Lady. With such a decidedly un-macho declaration, he made staid, stiff, sodden Toronto blue bloods sit up and say: “NOW HE'S GONE TOO FAR.”

I'm perversely glad that vagina dentate is what brought the Etobicoke Palace to its knees.

Best Scandal -- Local Venue

Rob Ford

Sorry, as we say south of Detroit. So sorry.

There is no other municipality in the world this year whose very name, “Toronto,” (derived from the Mohawk, “where there is mendacity standing in the water") has become synonymous with scandal.

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Dan Savage, a gay American author, media pundit, journalist, newspaper editor and advice columnist who writes Savage Love

Best Scandal — General Interest

Rob Ford

No contest: Rob Ford was the scandalous gift that kept on giving and giving and giving. From blaming his crack binges on drunken stupors — who amongst us hasn't found ourselves in a crack den sucking a pipe after one too many cocktails at our office holiday party? — to his riotous press conferences to what was the single cleverest cunnilingus joke ever uttered into a live mic by a politician, Rob Ford's Eric-Cartman-On-Crack routine never got stale. The man made live broadcasts of the Toronto City Council Meetings into must-watch TV. I'm looking forward to what Rob Ford has in store for us in 2014, as I'm sure most TPM readers are.

Best Scandal — Sex and Generalized Carnality

Rob Ford - The man is all appetite. Whatever you can eat, drink, smoke or fuck, you know Rob Ford has already chomped, swigged, blazed or boned it.

Best Scandal — Local Venue

Please. Rob Ford.

While most Americans have some vague sense that there's a whole other country up there somewhere — a frozen buffer there to enforce a geographic restraining order between the saner parts of the USA and Alaska — before 2013 most Americans would have had difficultly naming a single Canadian metropolis, much less naming a person who lives or lived in that city. But Rob Ford is to Toronto as Al Capone is to Chicago. Go anywhere in the world and tell someone you're from Chicago, and they'll point a finger at you and go, “Bang! Bang! Al Capone!” From now on folks from Toronto can travel the world secure in the knowledge that people have now heard of Toronto and that people know what to do when someone says they're from Toronto: Hold up a pretend crack pipe and go, “Crack! Crack! Rob Ford!”

If there were Golden Dukes for best makeup, best costume design, best special effects, and best sound, Rob Ford would win in those categories too."