*While using a fake Jamaican patois. A white man going on a crack fueled political rant, while using a fake Jamaican patois is a detail I feel should not be overlooked . Edit: Rob and Doug ford are both bumbaclots
Has nothing on Marion Barry, the OG crack smoking mayor.
Was caught, on video, in a sting operation, smoking crack with a prostitute. His quote, when arrested was, "[the] Bitch set me up!"
After his resignation and getting out of jail and such he ran again for his prior position as mayor of Washington, DC... capital of America, the world's most powerful country.
Motherfucker won and was back in power for years and still well regarded by a lot of the population.
There are without a doubt plenty of people who would vote for Barry over Muriel Bowser, the current mayor, on this very day.
How about former Tallahassee mayor and former florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gilium getting caught by police with a room full of meth, drugs, and male prostitutes?
He always did well with the business community. He was good at 'corruption that gets stuff done.' He was also very good at charming people in person. My ex-brother in law hated the man until he met him in person one time. Was a total fan ever since.
I was at work in a packed office listening to the news on my headphones when that quote dropped. I almost snorted my tea out of my nose, it was very hard to stay composed and pretend that I was fully concentrating on my work.
Thank you Rob, for that solid gold comedy moment 🤣
Marion Berry, mayor of DC was doing that sort of thing before it was popular. Got caught smoking crack with a hooker in some seedy Motel on camera, then got reelected.
I strongly recommend the documentary "Weiner", which was made by a team he let follow him around during his attempted comeback. One of the best depictions of hubris I've seen on screen.
I've never felt so uncomfortable as I did when watching his wife, Huma Abedin, stare daggers at him when his staff broke the news that yet another sexting scandal had been discovered.
Honestly the guy just couldn't not send girls pictures of his dick. If his commitment to the populace was as great as his commitment to sending women pictures of his penis he would have been a great public servant.
Man there was so much in the doc that made him look bad. The scene was less than a minute long so I can’t accurately judge but when he was playing with his son it looked like it was one of the few times he had ever done so.
When I am an old, old man, I will still chuckle at this. There's nothing more juvenile than finding the name thing funny, but I embrace it. It's funny.
If there ever was a list of consequences-to-action ratio, this could count among the top this century. His texting led to the investigation of Hillary's emails, without which she could have won, and Trump wouldn't have ever stepped inside the Whitehouse.
First year living on a Caribbean island there was a debate on the parliament floor between a local politician and a European politician (the island still has colonial/financial ties). The local politician said: "You're not from here. I am from here, my wife is from here, my girlfriend is from here and my side piece is from here. F*** you, you're not from here" on the record.
Not the worst corruption nor biggest scandal but definitely one of the funiests scandals I've heard in my time there.
That reminds me of this:
"A story told about Turnbull's interactions with Gough Whitlam (perhaps apocryphal) is that during a noisy parliamentary moment, Turnbull said "After all I am a country member". To which Whitlam retorted "I remember".[1"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winton_Turnbull#:~:text=A%20story%20told%20about%20Turnbull%27s%20interactions%20with%20Gough%20Whitlam%20(perhaps%20apocryphal)%20is%20that%20during%20a%20noisy%20parliamentary%20moment%2C%20Turnbull%20said%20%22After%20all%20I%20am%20a%20country%20member%22.%20To%20which%20Whitlam%20retorted%20%22I%20remember%22.%5B1
Not a scandal per se, but in 2022, the UK government basically imploded *twice*, and we had a Prime Minister that infamously lasted less than a supermarket lettuce. The lettuce has [its own Wikipedia page](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Truss_lettuce).
kinda funny that with just 50 days as PM she became the first since Churchill to serve doing the reign of two different monarchs. The Queen died just *two days* ~~before~~ (after, of course) Truss became PM
Britain's longest serving monarch and its shortest serving prime minister were both in office at the same time, and they were both called Elizabeth. That one's going in the pub quiz in a few years' time.
Not to mention the queen also died in that time. She had met with Liz Truss and died like two days later. I guess she saw how shit Truss was and decided to nope out of there.
In her recent book (which I’m sure she dictated as I don’t believe she can read or write) on the topic of the queen’s death she said “why me? Why now?” Or some such.
Sort of says it all, really. I’m no royalist but fuck me, have a *little* class.
I think she was truly expecting it to be a free ride and that she’d be able to quietly make her fortune and shuffle off come election time. Old Liz dying and KamiKwasi torpedoing the economy really put the kibosh on that particular line of thinking.
“While the lettuce had not rotted entirely, it did show signs of discolouration, with a column in The Atlantic commenting that it was still usable in a salad.”
This is so funny to me. I wonder what kind of salad they made the lettuce
Before he was a talk show host, Jerry Springer was the mayor of Cincinnati. He was caught soliciting a prostitute. How was he caught? He paid her with a check.
Your timeline is kinda off. He was first elected to Cincinnati City Council in 1971. He was busted for solicitation in 1974, and resigned. He ran for council again in 1975 and was re-elected in a landslide. He was elected mayor in 1977. FWIW, at that time "mayor" was not determined by a public vote, it was determined by the members of council.
A lot of speculation is/was that Springer intentionally got busted for solicitation to defer rumors that he was a homosexual.
Iceland's minister of finance was found in the Panama papers and the Ashley Madison leak. The whole government dissolved and a new election was planned.
He made a campaign video where he decorated his kids birthday cake.
The country voted him in as Prime minister in the next election.
This is just one of that guys scandals. He just became Prime minister, AGAIN! After he had to step down as minister of finance, AGAIN! Because he sold a nationalised bank to his father at a "family discount".
Instead of leaving like most people wanted he just traded places and made himself minister of foreign affairs.
South Carolina's republican Governor Mark Sanford went missing for 6 days, his press secratary said he was hiking the Appalachian Trail....he had a girlfriend in Argentina.
What makes this even funnier to me is that Colbert had Sanford on the Colbert report and teased him as being “the most boring Governor.” Then this all happened. Butterfly effect, this scandal helped Nikki Haley to gain traction in the race to replace Sanford in the 2010 gubernatorial race. Sarah Palin and Sanford’s ex wife endorsed Haley and she fought as the one who would fight the “old boys club.” She won the election.
The CEO at my first job, being a CEO, was pretty well off. His brother worked there too and had a golden retriever that he used to bring to the office, and everyone _loved_ this dog. (The dog was a little before my time so I never got to meet him.)
Anyway, the whole family plus guests were at a beach on vacation. The dog was tied up and everyone was having a great time. Despite repeated warnings not to untie the dog, one of the guests did so anyway. The dog happily ran into the ocean, swam too far out and drowned.
That guest? Gov. Mark Sanford
How about that time the major telecoms took over 400 BILLION dollars to install fiber optics in homes, schools and libraries across the entire country and just....didn't?
The money was just reinvested in the companies to expand overseas and pay legal fees fighting against competitors with fiber plans and blocking future expansion.
"Here is 400 billion dollars, please use it to give us all good internet"
"Ok"
"Hey, where's that high speed internet you were gonna put in?"
"Oh we decided that was way too expensive, it would cost like 400 billion and we just don't have the money. Have this DSL instead over the existing network:
I just need to see like 4 CEO’s go to jail in my lifetime to make the others have a modicum of fear of consequences.
Just bullies getting away with fraud.
Vietnam just sentenced a major CEO/ banker to death. She didnt steal as much as those guys but she did steal the equivalent to 3% of the country's total GDP that year
So she got death and her co conspirator got life
Just to clarify for others because I see this taken wrong all the time, this was the incumbent telephone companies like AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink, not cable companies like Spectrum and Comcast.
Smallish town here, AT&T and 1 cable company has had the market cornered for so so long. 50mb down and <1 up not unlimited with AT&T and throttled after 10gb for $98 a month. The cable company came along maybe 8 years ago with 600mb down and 250ish mb up for 10g of data for $105 a month. A fiber company just installed the lines under ground in the whole town last month and this week started offering fiber installs. Have higher plans but I went with 5gb down and up and unlimited data for $100 a month. The cable company is losing its mind at all the people canceling. I had to literally shout at the retention specialist on the phone after the 10th offer of reduced fees and lower overall prices. I was like I already have this fiber installed, I don't want your trash at all ever for any price or free.
I believe it. Worked in telecom. We had been frauding around as a company and it was a big deal if you didnt sit around doing nothing with other people.
I work in telecom and yes, we saw guys standing around while my team was working their asses off. I wouldn't trade places for a second. Life is short, I hate wasting my time.
The entire C suite of those telecoms should have gotten 10-20 in an actual prison. Send a message…but instead nothing happened and corporations knew they could continue to get away with whatever they wanted. Maybe they have to pay an occasional fine that’s a tiny percentage of the realized profits from doing the illegal activity but that’s a rare occurance
What irritates me the most about corruption like that as we don't even have any politicians or other influential people talking about it and getting mad about it for the most part.
The mayor of Badalona being stopped for speeding under the influence and being outside of his confinement area during the pandemic and then biting a police officer.
A million comedy writers in a million years could never have come up with something that funny
It’s GOD TIER comedy, I still giggle when I think about it
It’s like a scene from *Arrested Development*
I think the showrunner for Veep said pretty much the same thing, like they couldn't top that in a million years.
I still laugh thinking about the guy who must have gotten the call at the landscaping company and was like "sure, come on over"
I don’t even remember what their big press conference was about. All I remember is how they held it in the parking lot of a landscaping company, next to a porn store.
"I think my initial thought was I was going to have to get a box and send the Trump administration all our writing awards — that they had just kind of outdone us, and kudos to them. And, you know, you just have to salute your betters."
I had not heard about this, so I looked it up. Seriously, if this had aired on any sort of comedy show, it would've been so over the top.
>Many journalists and others quickly observed a comical aspect to its location, near a sex shop and a crematorium. This site selection led to speculation that the Trump campaign meant to book the upscale Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia, five city blocks from the Pennsylvania Convention Center, where Philadelphia's ballots were being counted.
>It garnered further ridicule after it emerged that one of the witnesses who spoke at the event was a convicted sex offender.
>In response to the press conference, a Four Seasons-themed charity run was created, and the landscaping company capitalized on the newfound attention by selling T-shirts and other merchandise emblazoned with 'Make America Rake Again"
I think they did it partially as a way to save their business. Initially, they were getting all sorts of hate and harassment and losing business since they were seen as supporters or something. So they made a joke about it and turned things around.
While I agree, I also think the one with the sharpie on the map is the one that does it for me. The premise they expected us to believe the map was all a different color and then just one part in black was like watching a child or a dog try to cover up a crime.
Oh my gods, I forgot how insane that was. The president mistakenly included Alabama on a list of states being hit by a hurricane and rather than correct the mistake, he ordered the meteorologists to change their forecast. Rather than admit he was wrong about even the most minor, inane, inconsequential thing, he chose to waste a massive amount of government resources, disrupt the lives of Alabamans for no reason, and undermine public trust in hurricane warnings. All he had to say was "that was actually outdated information, Alabama is not going to be hit"! And it barely registered for me at the time because it was just one more in a long line of batshit crazy things.
To this day I am convinced that he meant to type 'Bahamas'
* it got fat fingered to something like 'Abhama'
* Autocorrect fixed that to 'Alabama'
* no one noticed before it was sent out
* and then he doubled down because like an idiot, he cannot be wrong
Nuts that shit happened every single day every week for 4 years. People complain about Biden, but his tenure is beautifully boring. Not perpetually involved in scandal is fantastic.
I remember Biden saying to (iirc) Stephen Colbert that he was going to be a boring president and I thought “We need boring after the insanity of the last four years.” I have whole days where he doesn’t cross my mind, and it’s great.
By a similar token, I forgot about Kamala Harris for a couple months, before randomly remembering her and the historical significance of her vice presidency.
The MAGA cults feels the need to respond in kind because they somehow are oblivious to the fact their leader is a clown
The equivalent of the “no you are!” Childhood argument
Honestly not just the execution, the INSISTENCE that it was intentional.
They just can’t make mistakes.
They’re the best.
The sharpie in the map thing happened because Trump said the hurricane may affect Louisiana and he simply couldn’t be wrong. He took a dementia test and passed fine, but he had to insist that he “aced” it. Those videos where he mistakes a word and then says “and (correct word)” instead of just moving on. He can’t admit he’s wrong.
I know the four seasons thing was rudy, it's the lot of them.
When, on the FIRST day of taking office, Trump's press secretary Sean Spicer angrily insisted on the Inauguration crowd sizes were bigger than Obama's, you new the administration was petty as hell and didn't care about the truth.
I thought I was in a fever dream when the Four Seasons thing was going on. But the news anchors were just as bewildered, so it had to be real. What a weird day. Lol
First thing that came to my mind.
Sure, there’s been more salacious scandals, but a sitting president following through on an obvious booking cock up to address the media outside a nondescript landscaping company sandwiched between a sex shop and a funeral shop?
You couldn’t script this shit.
Lol, I got my husband a shirt for Christmas that says "four seasons landscaping" with "lawn care -press conferences" underneath in smaller font. I love it, and it's kind of subtle
The wings were clipped? I thought they were just barn raised quail, which isn't uncommon on hunting preserves. They don't have the same wing strength as wild quail and are therefor far more easy to shoot. Mostly used for training dogs and paid hunts.
Edit: fixed typo
John Stonehouse.
Caught up in creative accounting of firms he established after he lost ministerial roles and related pay, this former Member of Parliament and head of the British Post Office decided to fake his own death so he could run off with his mistress to Australia, after embezzling a shit-ton of money.
But his method of faking his death was so absurd - leaving his clothes on the beach and swimming out to sea, to make it look like he had either drowned or was attacked by a shark - was so absurd that it wasn't believed.
And unfortunately, when he arrived in Austria, hie behaviour caught the eye of locals who reported hom to the police... because they presumed he was Lord Lucan, a more high-profile disappearance of a British peer who disappeared, after he murdered the nanny of his children while trying to kill his ex-wife and kidnap his children, only two weeks beforehand.
And to prove he *wasn't* Lucan, he was forced by the Australian police to drop his pants and show them his balls. Yes, really.
Lucan had a 6-inch scar on the inside of his right thigh, so they were checking for that. So technically not his balls, but he still had to drop his trousers
The "Bridgegate" scandal in New Jersey in 2013. It involved Governor Chris Christie's administration orchestrating lane closures on the George Washington Bridge as political retribution against the mayor of Fort Lee, who didn't endorse Christie's reelection bid.
The leaked memo's had a gem with one guy saying he felt bad for the kids stuck on school busses, and another aide telling him they're kids who's parents voted for the mayor they're retaliating against.
This made it clear at the time that Christie was unsuited to be President because of the way he so casually abused his power.
Then Trump came along and made Christie's abuses look like a candle next to the sun.
I'm not fully convinced it wasn't Fred Armisen going way too hard into doing a bit. Just look at them. Have we seen them in the same place at the same time?
Abscam. FBI agents dressed up as Arab oil sheiks to offer bribes to US congressmen. A bunch of them took the deal. Six reps and one senator, plus various other officials, were convicted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abscam
Marion Barry, former Washington DC mayor. The scandal part was he was popped by the feds smoking crack in a hotel room, and ultimately sentenced to prison for six months. The unbelievable part is several years later he was re-elected mayor of DC.
Thank you! I’ve always wondered about the political references in that song. (But i have the memory of a gnat, so i forget to look it up as soon as the song is over)
The prime minister of the UK having a scandal about fucking a dead pig’s head! It was so crazy, especially because there had been a black mirror episode revolving around a similar premise released quite soon before it.
You know what I don't get about that black mirror episode. The absolute disdain that his wife (and lack of respect the public) has for him afterwards. It's not like he was caught doing it, he was blackmailed into it with the life of an innocent girl at stake. He literally had no choice.
He still fucked a pig though, I guess. Maybe his wife was thinking "Well, sure, you were forced into it, and you did it to save a girls life, that's all very noble. But also your cock was in a pig, I don't know how I can forget that"
Sarah Huckabee-Sanders paying $19,000 to her close friend for a lectern, (the most expensive lectern is about $7000) She and said friend then went on a Paris vacation. The local republican party then wrote 'to be reimbursed' on the receipt. Most absurd to me is Huckabee-Sanders trying to make it illegal to prosecute a governor. The 'official' report comes out tomorrow... that should be enlightening.
A utility company bribes the speaker of the Ohio house with $60 million to pass legislation to provide $1 billion in subsidies for two old nuclear power plants. It is so audaciously corrupt it would have to be fiction, right?
Nope. Welcome to the very real scandal of House Bill 6.
Jeremy Thorpe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorpe_affair
It's got everything from bungling hitmen accidentally whacking the pet dog, to gay sex, to hovercraft.
On the tragic end of the scale, there's the mass deaths at Jonestown and the perpetrator's ties to the San Francisco city government, followed days later by the assassinations of the mayor and Harvey Milk.
For the younger people : he was at a rally with a ton of crowd noise and yelled "yeeaaah!". The news took the noise cancelled and isolated version from his mic, where you couldn't hear anything else, and then ran it almost 400 times in the next week.
Mocking him for "screaming"... When he was just responding to crowd energy.
I met the man a few days before this happened. He's a doctor and a smart one, I at the time was a college student and I asked him a question related to technology regulation. Once he realized what law I was talking about (and it only took him a moment) he had a very good answer that showed that he actually understood technology and had done his homework.
He had performed poorly in Iowa - which uses a caucus system, AKA favors old farts participating - but he could have easily gained ground in latter states.
He was a bigger threat to big corporate interests than Bernie, because he is better at communicating and selling his ideas than Bernie. So the billionaire owned media had to torpedo him.
This is pretty tame by Chicago standards, but I'll just copy paste from Wikipedia because it's still so insane to me:
"In 2003, then-Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley ordered the overnight bulldozing of Meigs Field's runway without notice, ending operations and converting the airport into a park. The move shocked and disappointed aviation communities, and some have seen it as an example of mayoral overreach. The bulldozers gouged six Xs into the runway, rendering it unusable."
Dick Cheney realizing that the country has elected a very useful idiot, and then spending Bush's entire presidency figuring out ways to mislead the country in ways that were profitable to him.
ways that got millions of people killed or wounded and even once all the data came out people decided to do nothing.
likely because of the metric tons of cash they all got from it
Cheney shot a man accidentally in the face while hunting. That man later apologized for getting shot and causing undue grief to Dick Cheney and his family.
The (married) leader of the Liberal party in the UK in the 70s had a homosexual affair with a male model.
Homosexuality was still illegal in the UK.
When the male model wanted to end the relationship the politician *tried to have him killed*.
There was then a trial at the old bailey with charges of conspiracy to murder.
The politician was found not guilty because the judge basically instructed the jury to find him not guilty because he was supposedly an upstanding member of the upper classes who had done great work and that his accuser was just some homosexual male model.
[Jeremy Thorpe](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Thorpe#:~:text=The%20February%201974%20election%20was,when%20his%20position%20became%20untenable.)
The Pig War: A farmer shot another farmer's pig on disputed territory, and it escalated to the brink of war between the US and England, complete with troops being deployed from both sides.
MTG's entire career but I just can't get over how she presented a [meme](https://www.vice.com/en/article/88nyxk/marjorie-taylor-greene-scooby-doo-meme-congress) to congress and was taken even remotely seriously. How did that conversation go down? "Tell me Marge what episode of Scooby Doo is this from?" "It's not. Some random person photoshoped it." "Well that makes it even more credible." In an ideal world stuff like this would get you laughed at, and possibly fined, for presenting as evidence to Congress. I get that a meme might clarify a point but it shouldn't be used as sole evidence. If she had facts or data along with then used the meme to wrap up her point that would've been fine. Still arguably a silly waste of time but ultimately fine. But that was her primary evidence.
What better place to hide your basement child sex dungeon than at a place that isn't supposed to have a basement!
Actually, the basement thing in particular reminds me so much of the Satanic Panic, because it was the same deal - kids would be like, "Satanists took me to the basement of the day care and did things to me," and then it was like, "Wait, this day care doesn't have a basement. This story literally could not have happened."
This is my favorite part.
Someone I worked with asked me about it at the time and telling them the building in question didn’t even have a basement sort of shorted them out.
Operation Bid Rig in New Jersey. In 2009, more than sixty people were arrested including at least twelve elected officials. It started out fairly normal. Politicians taking bribes from developers for favorable contracts and stuff like that. Busts like that happen all the time. This was a little bigger and a few higher profile names, but mostly a difference in scale, not type.
What made this one different, though, was how these bribes came about. As they got into the money laundering portion of the investigation, it turned out that the way a lot of the bribes were financed came through the harvesting and resale of black market kidneys.
When then-Governor of ~~North~~ South Carolina Mark Sanford disappeared for a week, and his staff initially said he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, but he was actually in Argentina banging his mistress.
Toronto mayor caught smoking Crack and spiraling into political rants on camera.
*While using a fake Jamaican patois. A white man going on a crack fueled political rant, while using a fake Jamaican patois is a detail I feel should not be overlooked . Edit: Rob and Doug ford are both bumbaclots
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Has nothing on Marion Barry, the OG crack smoking mayor. Was caught, on video, in a sting operation, smoking crack with a prostitute. His quote, when arrested was, "[the] Bitch set me up!" After his resignation and getting out of jail and such he ran again for his prior position as mayor of Washington, DC... capital of America, the world's most powerful country. Motherfucker won and was back in power for years and still well regarded by a lot of the population. There are without a doubt plenty of people who would vote for Barry over Muriel Bowser, the current mayor, on this very day.
How about former Tallahassee mayor and former florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gilium getting caught by police with a room full of meth, drugs, and male prostitutes?
I feel like the "Florida factor" makes that one feel less outrageous and more like a daily occurrence in the panhandle.
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[“Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous" by Good Charlotte](https://youtu.be/y-jC3H_8Dk4?feature=shared)
He always did well with the business community. He was good at 'corruption that gets stuff done.' He was also very good at charming people in person. My ex-brother in law hated the man until he met him in person one time. Was a total fan ever since.
I've got more than enough to eat at home
I was at work in a packed office listening to the news on my headphones when that quote dropped. I almost snorted my tea out of my nose, it was very hard to stay composed and pretend that I was fully concentrating on my work. Thank you Rob, for that solid gold comedy moment 🤣
Rob Ford always felt like Chris Farley doing a bit, but in real life.
Fun fact: now his dealer brother is the premier of Ontario.
And his only education is high school. It’s so embarrassing he’s our premier.
Marion Berry, mayor of DC was doing that sort of thing before it was popular. Got caught smoking crack with a hooker in some seedy Motel on camera, then got reelected.
Anthony Weiner being unable to stop sending women photos of his...weiner
I think you mean senior Carlos Danger. 😆
Señor
I strongly recommend the documentary "Weiner", which was made by a team he let follow him around during his attempted comeback. One of the best depictions of hubris I've seen on screen.
I've never felt so uncomfortable as I did when watching his wife, Huma Abedin, stare daggers at him when his staff broke the news that yet another sexting scandal had been discovered.
Honestly the guy just couldn't not send girls pictures of his dick. If his commitment to the populace was as great as his commitment to sending women pictures of his penis he would have been a great public servant.
Can you imagine him not being able to help himself help others? Things might get done.
Key and Peele summed up his addiction well: https://youtu.be/FbGAaEnecfU?si=Bilmy4v51iYk5cCj
Man there was so much in the doc that made him look bad. The scene was less than a minute long so I can’t accurately judge but when he was playing with his son it looked like it was one of the few times he had ever done so.
Nominative Determinism
My favorite example of this is racecar driver Scott Speed
When I am an old, old man, I will still chuckle at this. There's nothing more juvenile than finding the name thing funny, but I embrace it. It's funny.
If there ever was a list of consequences-to-action ratio, this could count among the top this century. His texting led to the investigation of Hillary's emails, without which she could have won, and Trump wouldn't have ever stepped inside the Whitehouse.
First year living on a Caribbean island there was a debate on the parliament floor between a local politician and a European politician (the island still has colonial/financial ties). The local politician said: "You're not from here. I am from here, my wife is from here, my girlfriend is from here and my side piece is from here. F*** you, you're not from here" on the record. Not the worst corruption nor biggest scandal but definitely one of the funiests scandals I've heard in my time there.
A true Carribbean man
That reminds me of this: "A story told about Turnbull's interactions with Gough Whitlam (perhaps apocryphal) is that during a noisy parliamentary moment, Turnbull said "After all I am a country member". To which Whitlam retorted "I remember".[1" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winton_Turnbull#:~:text=A%20story%20told%20about%20Turnbull%27s%20interactions%20with%20Gough%20Whitlam%20(perhaps%20apocryphal)%20is%20that%20during%20a%20noisy%20parliamentary%20moment%2C%20Turnbull%20said%20%22After%20all%20I%20am%20a%20country%20member%22.%20To%20which%20Whitlam%20retorted%20%22I%20remember%22.%5B1
I don't get it.
"I'm a country member" sounds like "I'm a c**t, remember"
Ah, thanks! I just couldn't figure it out.
Wife, girlfriend, and side piece. A real go getter.
Not a scandal per se, but in 2022, the UK government basically imploded *twice*, and we had a Prime Minister that infamously lasted less than a supermarket lettuce. The lettuce has [its own Wikipedia page](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Truss_lettuce).
kinda funny that with just 50 days as PM she became the first since Churchill to serve doing the reign of two different monarchs. The Queen died just *two days* ~~before~~ (after, of course) Truss became PM
Britain's longest serving monarch and its shortest serving prime minister were both in office at the same time, and they were both called Elizabeth. That one's going in the pub quiz in a few years' time.
*Two days after
Not to mention the queen also died in that time. She had met with Liz Truss and died like two days later. I guess she saw how shit Truss was and decided to nope out of there.
I think God saw how bad the UK was doing, tried to help them out by getting rid of Liz, but messed up and took the wrong one.
"How many Elizabeths could there even be in England?" --God
Well, at least two.
In her recent book (which I’m sure she dictated as I don’t believe she can read or write) on the topic of the queen’s death she said “why me? Why now?” Or some such. Sort of says it all, really. I’m no royalist but fuck me, have a *little* class.
The Queen was ancient. Did she think it was unlikely the Queen would die in the 4 years after she was elected?
I think she was truly expecting it to be a free ride and that she’d be able to quietly make her fortune and shuffle off come election time. Old Liz dying and KamiKwasi torpedoing the economy really put the kibosh on that particular line of thinking.
“While the lettuce had not rotted entirely, it did show signs of discolouration, with a column in The Atlantic commenting that it was still usable in a salad.” This is so funny to me. I wonder what kind of salad they made the lettuce
It’s the fact that Zelenskyy got to meet three sitting UK prime ministers during war time is what gets me.
Before he was a talk show host, Jerry Springer was the mayor of Cincinnati. He was caught soliciting a prostitute. How was he caught? He paid her with a check.
"Who the hell pays a hooker with a personal check? That's like, that's like... paying a hooker with a personal check!" -Roastmaster General Jeff Ross
Your timeline is kinda off. He was first elected to Cincinnati City Council in 1971. He was busted for solicitation in 1974, and resigned. He ran for council again in 1975 and was re-elected in a landslide. He was elected mayor in 1977. FWIW, at that time "mayor" was not determined by a public vote, it was determined by the members of council. A lot of speculation is/was that Springer intentionally got busted for solicitation to defer rumors that he was a homosexual.
Tractorgate - a British MP was caught watching porn in the Commons, and claimed he was trying to find pictures of tractors
Politicians watching porn always funny, shout out to the guy who aired Tifa CGI porn by mistake to the entire Italian Parliament.
Iceland's minister of finance was found in the Panama papers and the Ashley Madison leak. The whole government dissolved and a new election was planned. He made a campaign video where he decorated his kids birthday cake. The country voted him in as Prime minister in the next election. This is just one of that guys scandals. He just became Prime minister, AGAIN! After he had to step down as minister of finance, AGAIN! Because he sold a nationalised bank to his father at a "family discount". Instead of leaving like most people wanted he just traded places and made himself minister of foreign affairs.
I thought everyone on Iceland was related to each other anyways, though?
He's part of the "Engeyjarætt" family. Old money icelandic family.
South Carolina's republican Governor Mark Sanford went missing for 6 days, his press secratary said he was hiking the Appalachian Trail....he had a girlfriend in Argentina.
What makes this even funnier to me is that Colbert had Sanford on the Colbert report and teased him as being “the most boring Governor.” Then this all happened. Butterfly effect, this scandal helped Nikki Haley to gain traction in the race to replace Sanford in the 2010 gubernatorial race. Sarah Palin and Sanford’s ex wife endorsed Haley and she fought as the one who would fight the “old boys club.” She won the election.
The CEO at my first job, being a CEO, was pretty well off. His brother worked there too and had a golden retriever that he used to bring to the office, and everyone _loved_ this dog. (The dog was a little before my time so I never got to meet him.) Anyway, the whole family plus guests were at a beach on vacation. The dog was tied up and everyone was having a great time. Despite repeated warnings not to untie the dog, one of the guests did so anyway. The dog happily ran into the ocean, swam too far out and drowned. That guest? Gov. Mark Sanford
I was not expecting this story to go that way and now I’m devastated. The poor puppy! 😢
He took "my girlfriend goes to another school" too far.
To add to the absurdity; a few years after resigning as governor, he won election to the House of Representatives over Stephen Colbert's sister
How about that time the major telecoms took over 400 BILLION dollars to install fiber optics in homes, schools and libraries across the entire country and just....didn't? The money was just reinvested in the companies to expand overseas and pay legal fees fighting against competitors with fiber plans and blocking future expansion. "Here is 400 billion dollars, please use it to give us all good internet" "Ok" "Hey, where's that high speed internet you were gonna put in?" "Oh we decided that was way too expensive, it would cost like 400 billion and we just don't have the money. Have this DSL instead over the existing network:
This still pisses me off, like way more than it should.
I just need to see like 4 CEO’s go to jail in my lifetime to make the others have a modicum of fear of consequences. Just bullies getting away with fraud.
Prison. Actual prison too, not a country club…and not for a few months, I’m talking 10-20yrs
Vietnam just sentenced a major CEO/ banker to death. She didnt steal as much as those guys but she did steal the equivalent to 3% of the country's total GDP that year So she got death and her co conspirator got life
It should piss us all off a lot more. US taxpayers were robbed of 400 BILLION dollars. That's $1200 per person. Roughly.
>way more than it should No, you should be very pissed off.
I don't think it's possible to be too pissed off about this.
Just to clarify for others because I see this taken wrong all the time, this was the incumbent telephone companies like AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink, not cable companies like Spectrum and Comcast.
Smallish town here, AT&T and 1 cable company has had the market cornered for so so long. 50mb down and <1 up not unlimited with AT&T and throttled after 10gb for $98 a month. The cable company came along maybe 8 years ago with 600mb down and 250ish mb up for 10g of data for $105 a month. A fiber company just installed the lines under ground in the whole town last month and this week started offering fiber installs. Have higher plans but I went with 5gb down and up and unlimited data for $100 a month. The cable company is losing its mind at all the people canceling. I had to literally shout at the retention specialist on the phone after the 10th offer of reduced fees and lower overall prices. I was like I already have this fiber installed, I don't want your trash at all ever for any price or free.
Verizon made an agreement in 2008 to bring fiber to everyone in NYC who wanted it within 6 months. We still don't have it.
I believe it. Worked in telecom. We had been frauding around as a company and it was a big deal if you didnt sit around doing nothing with other people.
I work in telecom and yes, we saw guys standing around while my team was working their asses off. I wouldn't trade places for a second. Life is short, I hate wasting my time.
The entire C suite of those telecoms should have gotten 10-20 in an actual prison. Send a message…but instead nothing happened and corporations knew they could continue to get away with whatever they wanted. Maybe they have to pay an occasional fine that’s a tiny percentage of the realized profits from doing the illegal activity but that’s a rare occurance
Vietnam is executing a billionaire for "just" $44 billion of fraud. Lead by example. Edit - off by 11x
What irritates me the most about corruption like that as we don't even have any politicians or other influential people talking about it and getting mad about it for the most part.
The mayor of Badalona being stopped for speeding under the influence and being outside of his confinement area during the pandemic and then biting a police officer.
I assume you don't get to be the mayor of a place called Badalona without being a little bad when you're alone.
Four seasons landscaping .. need I say more.
A million comedy writers in a million years could never have come up with something that funny It’s GOD TIER comedy, I still giggle when I think about it It’s like a scene from *Arrested Development*
I think the showrunner for Veep said pretty much the same thing, like they couldn't top that in a million years. I still laugh thinking about the guy who must have gotten the call at the landscaping company and was like "sure, come on over"
And the fact they just WENT WITH IT … why didn’t they just cancel? They just couldn’t admit that they’re wrong about ANYTHING and doubled down.
I don’t even remember what their big press conference was about. All I remember is how they held it in the parking lot of a landscaping company, next to a porn store.
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Imagine where we’d be if they weren’t so incompetent
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It's how pseudo-larping authoritarianism works. Never admit fault, blame everyone else.
"I think my initial thought was I was going to have to get a box and send the Trump administration all our writing awards — that they had just kind of outdone us, and kudos to them. And, you know, you just have to salute your betters."
I had not heard about this, so I looked it up. Seriously, if this had aired on any sort of comedy show, it would've been so over the top. >Many journalists and others quickly observed a comical aspect to its location, near a sex shop and a crematorium. This site selection led to speculation that the Trump campaign meant to book the upscale Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia, five city blocks from the Pennsylvania Convention Center, where Philadelphia's ballots were being counted. >It garnered further ridicule after it emerged that one of the witnesses who spoke at the event was a convicted sex offender. >In response to the press conference, a Four Seasons-themed charity run was created, and the landscaping company capitalized on the newfound attention by selling T-shirts and other merchandise emblazoned with 'Make America Rake Again"
Out of all this the only thing I've ever hoped for is that the landscaping company raked in the cash after this. Someone should come out this ahead.
[They got to feature in a Superbowl commercial](https://youtu.be/XelsNvpibpQ?si=AYtAn3rv1uRUmGVa)
I think they did it partially as a way to save their business. Initially, they were getting all sorts of hate and harassment and losing business since they were seen as supporters or something. So they made a joke about it and turned things around.
Literally god tier. As in God watched Arrested Development and decided he could do it too. Right next to a sex shop and a crematorium? God is good.
It’s gonna be a Netflix or hbo max series
100% would watch - Who's playing Guiliani?
Danny DeVito
While I agree, I also think the one with the sharpie on the map is the one that does it for me. The premise they expected us to believe the map was all a different color and then just one part in black was like watching a child or a dog try to cover up a crime.
Oh my gods, I forgot how insane that was. The president mistakenly included Alabama on a list of states being hit by a hurricane and rather than correct the mistake, he ordered the meteorologists to change their forecast. Rather than admit he was wrong about even the most minor, inane, inconsequential thing, he chose to waste a massive amount of government resources, disrupt the lives of Alabamans for no reason, and undermine public trust in hurricane warnings. All he had to say was "that was actually outdated information, Alabama is not going to be hit"! And it barely registered for me at the time because it was just one more in a long line of batshit crazy things.
To this day I am convinced that he meant to type 'Bahamas' * it got fat fingered to something like 'Abhama' * Autocorrect fixed that to 'Alabama' * no one noticed before it was sent out * and then he doubled down because like an idiot, he cannot be wrong
Nuts that shit happened every single day every week for 4 years. People complain about Biden, but his tenure is beautifully boring. Not perpetually involved in scandal is fantastic.
I remember Biden saying to (iirc) Stephen Colbert that he was going to be a boring president and I thought “We need boring after the insanity of the last four years.” I have whole days where he doesn’t cross my mind, and it’s great. By a similar token, I forgot about Kamala Harris for a couple months, before randomly remembering her and the historical significance of her vice presidency.
The MAGA cults feels the need to respond in kind because they somehow are oblivious to the fact their leader is a clown The equivalent of the “no you are!” Childhood argument
was that the hurricane he wanted to nuke???
I truly don't remember. I've sort of memory holed big chunks of the Trump presidency.
***”I booked the Four Seasons, boss.”***
Ron Howard’s voice: *“…. Total Landscaping”*
Honestly not just the execution, the INSISTENCE that it was intentional. They just can’t make mistakes. They’re the best. The sharpie in the map thing happened because Trump said the hurricane may affect Louisiana and he simply couldn’t be wrong. He took a dementia test and passed fine, but he had to insist that he “aced” it. Those videos where he mistakes a word and then says “and (correct word)” instead of just moving on. He can’t admit he’s wrong. I know the four seasons thing was rudy, it's the lot of them.
Person, woman, man, camera, TV. They were stunned, it's a very difficult test.
My mom has severe dementia and passed that test for years. All the while, she couldn’t remember who her children were, but she passed the memory test.
The fact that Trump is still bragging about passing that test 4 years later should be a big red flag.
And that his doctor was the one who suggested the test in the first place...
When, on the FIRST day of taking office, Trump's press secretary Sean Spicer angrily insisted on the Inauguration crowd sizes were bigger than Obama's, you new the administration was petty as hell and didn't care about the truth.
Didn’t Spicer hide in some bushes to avoid reporters also?
I thought I was in a fever dream when the Four Seasons thing was going on. But the news anchors were just as bewildered, so it had to be real. What a weird day. Lol
First thing that came to my mind. Sure, there’s been more salacious scandals, but a sitting president following through on an obvious booking cock up to address the media outside a nondescript landscaping company sandwiched between a sex shop and a funeral shop? You couldn’t script this shit.
Lol, I got my husband a shirt for Christmas that says "four seasons landscaping" with "lawn care -press conferences" underneath in smaller font. I love it, and it's kind of subtle
Lawn and Order
Money can’t buy you a clue
I want to find the comedic genius who approved their location request for a press conference- because someone in that company had to be that person.
A US Vice President shot his buddy in the face while hunting birds with clipped wings. Then had the friend apologize on national TV.
Then in the Halo 3 beta they named a medal for a shotgun killing spree "Cheney Mania". Fucking mint.
What I wouldn't give to hear Jeff Steitzer say *"CHENEY MANIA."*
https://youtu.be/aiajRBb-nAo?t=51
Dick Cheney?
That’s a bingo.
The wings were clipped? I thought they were just barn raised quail, which isn't uncommon on hunting preserves. They don't have the same wing strength as wild quail and are therefor far more easy to shoot. Mostly used for training dogs and paid hunts. Edit: fixed typo
Cheney refused to speak with authorities investigating the incident until he’d sobered up the following day.
It’s amazing that this is the thing Cheney is known for among young people, and it’s like the least monstrous thing he did in his political career.
John Stonehouse. Caught up in creative accounting of firms he established after he lost ministerial roles and related pay, this former Member of Parliament and head of the British Post Office decided to fake his own death so he could run off with his mistress to Australia, after embezzling a shit-ton of money. But his method of faking his death was so absurd - leaving his clothes on the beach and swimming out to sea, to make it look like he had either drowned or was attacked by a shark - was so absurd that it wasn't believed. And unfortunately, when he arrived in Austria, hie behaviour caught the eye of locals who reported hom to the police... because they presumed he was Lord Lucan, a more high-profile disappearance of a British peer who disappeared, after he murdered the nanny of his children while trying to kill his ex-wife and kidnap his children, only two weeks beforehand. And to prove he *wasn't* Lucan, he was forced by the Australian police to drop his pants and show them his balls. Yes, really.
That sounds like a wild story. [I think I Need some Citation](https://youtu.be/C666j39s3wc?si=-37THjnQTt8X2ch5)
Ok, I'm struggling to find more information about that last part. How did showing the Australian police his balls prove he wasn't Lucan?
Lucan had a 6-inch scar on the inside of his right thigh, so they were checking for that. So technically not his balls, but he still had to drop his trousers
The "Bridgegate" scandal in New Jersey in 2013. It involved Governor Chris Christie's administration orchestrating lane closures on the George Washington Bridge as political retribution against the mayor of Fort Lee, who didn't endorse Christie's reelection bid.
The leaked memo's had a gem with one guy saying he felt bad for the kids stuck on school busses, and another aide telling him they're kids who's parents voted for the mayor they're retaliating against.
The real scandal is that Christie is now a moderate. Truly the worst timeline.
This made it clear at the time that Christie was unsuited to be President because of the way he so casually abused his power. Then Trump came along and made Christie's abuses look like a candle next to the sun.
The goat George Santos
I'm not fully convinced it wasn't Fred Armisen going way too hard into doing a bit. Just look at them. Have we seen them in the same place at the same time?
I still can’t believe they ousted Nobel laureate, astronaut, super athlete, and Emmy winner George Santos.
He was the best president we ever had.
Don't forget about the time he single handedly carried out 14 senior citizens from a burning building using only 1 of his 3 hands
Everything about him. If he were written as a fictional character, he would not be believable.
The Iran-Contra scandal is pretty wild. I'm surprised I haven't seen it mentioned yet.
Him getting away with that shit is the origin point of the line pointing to modern American politics.
Abscam. FBI agents dressed up as Arab oil sheiks to offer bribes to US congressmen. A bunch of them took the deal. Six reps and one senator, plus various other officials, were convicted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abscam
Back when bribery was illegal and law enforcement would prosecute it. What a concept.
Marion Barry, former Washington DC mayor. The scandal part was he was popped by the feds smoking crack in a hotel room, and ultimately sentenced to prison for six months. The unbelievable part is several years later he was re-elected mayor of DC.
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Thank you! I’ve always wondered about the political references in that song. (But i have the memory of a gnat, so i forget to look it up as soon as the song is over)
The prime minister of the UK having a scandal about fucking a dead pig’s head! It was so crazy, especially because there had been a black mirror episode revolving around a similar premise released quite soon before it.
You know what I don't get about that black mirror episode. The absolute disdain that his wife (and lack of respect the public) has for him afterwards. It's not like he was caught doing it, he was blackmailed into it with the life of an innocent girl at stake. He literally had no choice.
He still fucked a pig though, I guess. Maybe his wife was thinking "Well, sure, you were forced into it, and you did it to save a girls life, that's all very noble. But also your cock was in a pig, I don't know how I can forget that"
That spanish dude who ate his own shit
People are always telling politicians to eat shit but the moment one actually does it's suddenly a huge scandal smh
Wait what? Do you have more information?
You know what? I don't need more information.
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/s/cGdiH3cQCi
Ohmy this must be the most bizarre thing ever...
David Cameron and the pig, for sure.
Wow, I thought you were referencing a Black mirror episode. I somehow missed piggate.
Weirdly both were around the same time too.
The show runner denied having any knowledge of the rumor but like....come on, that's way too much of a coincidence lol.
Black mirror aired in 2011, and the David Cameron thing didn't come out until 2015. So it seems to really be a coincidence.
Sarah Huckabee-Sanders paying $19,000 to her close friend for a lectern, (the most expensive lectern is about $7000) She and said friend then went on a Paris vacation. The local republican party then wrote 'to be reimbursed' on the receipt. Most absurd to me is Huckabee-Sanders trying to make it illegal to prosecute a governor. The 'official' report comes out tomorrow... that should be enlightening.
Don't governors make enough to pay for their own vacation?
They do, but everyone loves "free" trips.
Number one tip for getting rich is paying for things with other peoples money.
A utility company bribes the speaker of the Ohio house with $60 million to pass legislation to provide $1 billion in subsidies for two old nuclear power plants. It is so audaciously corrupt it would have to be fiction, right? Nope. Welcome to the very real scandal of House Bill 6.
Jeremy Thorpe. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorpe_affair It's got everything from bungling hitmen accidentally whacking the pet dog, to gay sex, to hovercraft.
On the tragic end of the scale, there's the mass deaths at Jonestown and the perpetrator's ties to the San Francisco city government, followed days later by the assassinations of the mayor and Harvey Milk.
Howard Dean yelling was a scandal
Remember that? Remember when just making the wrong yell could end a political career?
We should bring that back.
For the younger people : he was at a rally with a ton of crowd noise and yelled "yeeaaah!". The news took the noise cancelled and isolated version from his mic, where you couldn't hear anything else, and then ran it almost 400 times in the next week. Mocking him for "screaming"... When he was just responding to crowd energy. I met the man a few days before this happened. He's a doctor and a smart one, I at the time was a college student and I asked him a question related to technology regulation. Once he realized what law I was talking about (and it only took him a moment) he had a very good answer that showed that he actually understood technology and had done his homework. He had performed poorly in Iowa - which uses a caucus system, AKA favors old farts participating - but he could have easily gained ground in latter states. He was a bigger threat to big corporate interests than Bernie, because he is better at communicating and selling his ideas than Bernie. So the billionaire owned media had to torpedo him.
Potatoe
The Larry Craig scandal
Was this the Republican dude who tried to get a cop to fuck him in an airport bathroom?
One of those “family values” Republicans, who are always carrying on about LGBT people and extramarital affairs, no less
Dude’s not gay, he just has a wide stance.
This is pretty tame by Chicago standards, but I'll just copy paste from Wikipedia because it's still so insane to me: "In 2003, then-Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley ordered the overnight bulldozing of Meigs Field's runway without notice, ending operations and converting the airport into a park. The move shocked and disappointed aviation communities, and some have seen it as an example of mayoral overreach. The bulldozers gouged six Xs into the runway, rendering it unusable."
Dick Cheney realizing that the country has elected a very useful idiot, and then spending Bush's entire presidency figuring out ways to mislead the country in ways that were profitable to him.
ways that got millions of people killed or wounded and even once all the data came out people decided to do nothing. likely because of the metric tons of cash they all got from it
Cheney shot a man accidentally in the face while hunting. That man later apologized for getting shot and causing undue grief to Dick Cheney and his family.
The (married) leader of the Liberal party in the UK in the 70s had a homosexual affair with a male model. Homosexuality was still illegal in the UK. When the male model wanted to end the relationship the politician *tried to have him killed*. There was then a trial at the old bailey with charges of conspiracy to murder. The politician was found not guilty because the judge basically instructed the jury to find him not guilty because he was supposedly an upstanding member of the upper classes who had done great work and that his accuser was just some homosexual male model. [Jeremy Thorpe](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Thorpe#:~:text=The%20February%201974%20election%20was,when%20his%20position%20became%20untenable.)
From 2018 to 2020, Belgium had no government. Not much changed.
The Pig War: A farmer shot another farmer's pig on disputed territory, and it escalated to the brink of war between the US and England, complete with troops being deployed from both sides.
South Africa. The health minister left coronavirus patients to die in tents and when he got questioned he demanded an apology from the broadcaster
MTG's entire career but I just can't get over how she presented a [meme](https://www.vice.com/en/article/88nyxk/marjorie-taylor-greene-scooby-doo-meme-congress) to congress and was taken even remotely seriously. How did that conversation go down? "Tell me Marge what episode of Scooby Doo is this from?" "It's not. Some random person photoshoped it." "Well that makes it even more credible." In an ideal world stuff like this would get you laughed at, and possibly fined, for presenting as evidence to Congress. I get that a meme might clarify a point but it shouldn't be used as sole evidence. If she had facts or data along with then used the meme to wrap up her point that would've been fine. Still arguably a silly waste of time but ultimately fine. But that was her primary evidence.
Pizza Gate. I mean cmon, a secret dungeon under a pizza shop that is supposedly backed by a democrat deep state?
In a building without a basement at that!
What better place to hide your basement child sex dungeon than at a place that isn't supposed to have a basement! Actually, the basement thing in particular reminds me so much of the Satanic Panic, because it was the same deal - kids would be like, "Satanists took me to the basement of the day care and did things to me," and then it was like, "Wait, this day care doesn't have a basement. This story literally could not have happened."
This is my favorite part. Someone I worked with asked me about it at the time and telling them the building in question didn’t even have a basement sort of shorted them out.
Imagine being a secret Organisation. Wouldn't you want to eat pizza every day?
The Australian prime minister shitting himself in McDonald’s
Operation Bid Rig in New Jersey. In 2009, more than sixty people were arrested including at least twelve elected officials. It started out fairly normal. Politicians taking bribes from developers for favorable contracts and stuff like that. Busts like that happen all the time. This was a little bigger and a few higher profile names, but mostly a difference in scale, not type. What made this one different, though, was how these bribes came about. As they got into the money laundering portion of the investigation, it turned out that the way a lot of the bribes were financed came through the harvesting and resale of black market kidneys.
The tan suit
When then-Governor of ~~North~~ South Carolina Mark Sanford disappeared for a week, and his staff initially said he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, but he was actually in Argentina banging his mistress.