The City Hall press corp won’t have Adam Giambrone to kick around anymore.
His departure from politics (a subject speculated upon in a NOW article a couple of weeks back) was confirmed by Giambrone late Monday night.
The disgraced former mayoral candidate is leaving politics for a time, probably for good. His executive assistant Kevin Beaulieu will run for the Davenport seat in Giambrone’s place.
It’s too bad it had to end this way. But in the end Giambrone really had no choice.
It was clear in the weeks following his fall from grace and abrupt exit from the mayoral race over l’affaire Kristen Lucas that certain media weren’t prepared to let him make his public penance and forget the so-called sex scandal, even if it was with a publicity-seeking groupie-turned-model wannabe. How precious.
Certainly, the morality squad at the Star was busily scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with anything they could on Giambrone, dredging up a $10 cab ride he may or may not have taken to meet Lucas and expensed to the city more than a year ago. Big whoop.
Hey, he had sex with her in his taxpayer subsidized City Hall office and then lied about it. He deserves to have his political career completely destroyed, right? So it seems. They don’t call it mob journalism for nothing.
The rabid fools over at the Sun, desperate to bump up circulation by any means necessary, went right into the gutter, re-running a photo from a celebrity blogger’s site allegedly of Giambrone in the shower, but obviously not, and supposedly taken by Lucas. No reason to let the truth get in the way of a good story.
The public, too, mostly the right-wing nuts who inhabit the peanut gallery of public opinion, showed an eagerness to keep on kicking Giambrone while he was down, going onto his Twitter, among other websites, to ask who Giambrone was screwing now every time he made a tentative attempt to get back to the business of work or the TTC.
Sad, really, what the entire episode says about the state of out human condition and politics in general, so challenged some of us are in our personal lives that we take great glee in destroying others. Let he who is without sin, I say…
Giambrone was saying all the right things in recent weeks about his very public fall and the continuing scrutiny in the press that it’s part of the price those who enter politics must be prepared to pay.
It’s clear from his comments to the Globe, however, that he doesn’t believe it, that politics and personal life should be kept separate.
Could Giambrone really trust the media to give him a fair shake the next time controversy erupted? It’s highly doubtful. By quitting Giambrone understood that everything he does from now on will be seen through the distorted Lucas prism. And there’s no fighting that, no matter your convictions.
Giambrone says part of the reason he quit is to spare his family any possible future embarrassment.
Are there any more proverbial skeletons in Giambrone’s closet? I’d say it’s probably nobody’s business.
But my guess is they’ll be coming out soon. In the minds of some of the press the job of taking Giambrone right down is not quite finished. There’s still the matter of his chairing of the TTC. Hopefully, it won’t come to that, but something tells me it just might. [rssbreak]
