Memo To Barry: Enough

Just last week, Barry told a bizarre tale of being robbed in his apartment by two kids whom he announced he loved and would not hold responsible for their act. However odd the story was, many people decided to pretend that everything was okay. Just move along, folks, nothing to see here.

In 1998, when Barry was sounding like he might run for a fifth term as mayor, I traveled with him to Harvard Towers, where the old ladies giggled like schoolgirls to see him. Moore remembers: "They had lipstick on and makeup on. They had their hair fixed for him. I told them, 'You won't see him after he's elected,' but they didn't care."

Barry's star power won him bye after bye. When he went to jail in the early 1990s, when members of his administration went to jail, when his women seemed to be tucked away in every ward, when the District sank so deep people thought it would never come back -- always, he was still the sharecropper's son who came up from the streets to create more black prosperity than probably anybody else in American history, and that somehow excused the rest.

Now he's a 69-year-old man with a cocaine problem, poor health and an arrogance that led him to ignore the tax man year after year.

He needs to resign from the council, for he has finally disgraced his office one time too many.

If he needs a judge to help him make that decision, so be it. And if Barry still declines to see how far he has fallen, then maybe he deserves another dose of prison. Not that it will turn him around, not even that it will send a message to the city's young people. But because we live in a society of laws, and even the brightest of stars must follow the occasional rule.

Ray Moore and just about everyone else I spoke to at Harvard Towers yesterday ended up using the same word: "Enough."

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