Exploiting Veterans

Few things are as detestable as exploiting certain groups for your own personal political gain. At the lowest levels of respectability would be the use of our nation's veterans of the armed forces to further your own political exposure.

But that is just what Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz has been doing in her two-year run-up to a run for the governor's office in 2010, according to the work of Brian Lockhart.

The Secretary of State in Connecticut is the chief elections official. Her job has absolutely nothing to do with veterans or the military, and she has devised a very thin and cheap excuse for routinely touring the state placing herself in charge of ceremonies that honor Connecticut's veterans. She claims that in her responsibilities for encouraging voting and engaging in government somehow provide the nexus. Very weak.

Rather, it would appear that she has attempted to gain political points with veterans, their families, and supporters of the military by tugging at all their heartstrings with these very nice and touching ceremonies.

No one would argue that honoring veterans is a bad thing. Clearly we don't even begin to give the proper honors due our great men and women who stand the post for us against tyranny and defend our freedom. But our state's chief elections official is not the one to be coordinating such events for herself.

Bysiewicz has a habit of doing things that aren't her job, and not doing the things that are. While she jaunts around Connecticut on the taxpayer dime holding these ceremonies, there still isn't a complete list of municipal election results on her website nearly a month after the fact.

While she stood at Long Island Sound pretending to be our other attorney general fighting a proposed liquefied water-borne natural gas terminal which also had NOTHING to do with her office, it was revealed that there were 9,000 dead people on the voting roles that her office failed to purge, and many were voting consistently. A bunch of journalism students did the work of her office while she was busy jumping up and down behind Dick Blumenthal's shoulder at Broadwater press conferences trying to get noticed.

Two years ago she managed to get away without the media examining the legitimacy of her roles in the things she attempts to inject herself into. Finally they are paying attention.