Day 10: Bitch Set Me Up

I am obsessed with former D.C. mayor Marion Barry. He is currently a member of the City Council, and most people remember him as the mayor who was caught on tape by the FBI in 1990, smoking crack in a motel room with a former girlfriend and escort. He was sent to prison for six months on a previous drug charge, and has been making a concerted effort for the past nearly-40 years to prove to everyone that he is completely space-fuck crazy.

I find it totally baffling that he enjoys the popularity that he does--getting elected to the City Council for term after term, despite numerous arrests on various drug, DUI, and tax evasion charges. Here's why I love him, though: his efforts to defend himself are nearly always successful despite the fact that he has yet to open his mouth without something totally ludicrous falling out of it. In 2006, when he was arrested near the U.S. Capital for DUI, operating while impaired, driving an unregistered vehicle, and misuse of temporary tags, the arresting officers found cocaine traces in his car and "a white powdery substance under his nose." Barry, in regards to the incident, said the following:

"First, it was not a strip bar, it was an erotic club. And second, what can
I say? I'm a night owl."

Whaaa?

The man has claimed that the law of gravity is racist. He has purported that D.C.'s crime rate is very low, except for all the murders. He has claimed that he was more popular than President Reagan, who was elected to only two terms, while he himself was serving his third. In 1990, everyone in town was wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the words "Bitch Set Me Up!" -- the line that Barry uttered as the FBI arrested him while smoking crack in the Vista Motel.

Barry's latest hairshirt: it's recently been revealed that he failed to pay his 2007 taxes. This should come as a shock to no one, as he hasn't paid taxes for eight of the past nine years (the ninth year, he didn't owe any taxes.) I would be totally disgusted by this, except I can't wait to hear what he has to say on the subject. I really hope that it's something like this quote attributed to our fine former mayor:

"The contagious people of Washington have stood firm against diversity
during this long period of increment weather."

Yeah. I don't really know what that means.

*Edited! Barry claims that he didn't pay his taxes because he is distracted by his ongoing kidney dialysis. He is in end-stage renal failure and has found a family friend who is planning to donate a kidney to Barry for transplant. All I'm sayin' is, are they not familiar, somehow, with the man's body of work? He's not exactly a paragon of well-being. I'm not saying drug addicts shouldn't receive organ donations, but I've got an uncle who's been on dialysis for seven years now, and to the best of my knowledge, he's paid his taxes every year and I'm really doubting that he's ever smoked crack in a motel room with a hooker. I'm just sayin'.