Recently I alluded to the fact that the New London Day, and in particular, its columnist, Dave Collins has been conducting a bit of a jihad against our State Senator, Andy Maynard. Andy suffered a brain injury before the last election. He now suffers from aphasia, which means he has trouble articulating his thoughts. As the Day knows, his constituents re-elected him with full knowledge that he had had the accident and had possibly suffered brain damage, but Collins in particular, and the newspaper in general, has insisted that Andy should not vote, because he is being manipulated by the evil Democratic Senate leaders.
Last week, on the 13th, the Day printed an article about a letter former (thank God) Congressman and current Stonington first selectman Rob Simmons wrote in which he basically pushed the same meme. Naturally, the Day gave the letter front page treatment.
I took pen to hand and wrote this:
Rob Simmons’s recent attack on Senate Democrats for allegedly manipulating Andy Maynard was an exercise in precisely what he was accusing the Democrats of doing: manipulating Andy Maynard for his own purposes. Mr. Simmons wants us to believe that he can speak for Andy, and tell us what Andy would do if only Andy were not being manipulated by those terrible Democrats. We are to believe that Simmons has only Andy’s best interest at heart, politics having nothing at all to do with it. We are also to believe that if only Andy were the Andy Rob once knew, he would vote as a Republican, like Rob always did.
Simmons undoubtedly knew the Day would give him maximum exposure, as he’s just repeating the meme the Day has been pushing for over a year in its columns and news stories. There is, in fact, no reason to believe that Andy’s aphasia has affected his ability to make his own decisions, and the constituent service offered by his office has not suffered as a result of his disability. His disability renders him an easy target. Since he can’t verbalize a response, he loses no matter what he does.
The Day called me to confirm I’d written it, but it has yet to see print and it probably never will.
This is the second letter in a row that I’ve written that the Day has rejected. My wife wrote a letter, which it did print, attacking our local (Republican) state representatives as do nothings. It drew a printed response from a letter writer, with a defense so lame as to be laughable. I wrote a response to that letter, which the Day refused to print unless I was identified as my wife’s spouse, using her name. My wife preferred not to become the issue. I didn’t fight about it, but the logic escapes me. If my letter made sense, which of course it did, what difference does my relationship to my wife make?
The Day used to be a good paper, but it is rapidly becoming Fox on the Thames.
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