Bryan Simonaire AGAIN Exploiting Suicides by Veterans
You would think that he would learn that this is a bad idea, but State Senator Bryan Simonaire is still trying to exploit suicides committed by Maryland’s veterans for political purposes.
In his monthly campaign advertisement column for the Pasadena Voice, Simionaire shameless tries to present himself as the champion of veterans everywhere. His piece, with the self-serving headline It Is A Privilege To Help Our Military And Veterans lays out all of Simonaire’s accomplishments in this area. Sadly, the piece is rather brief as Simonaire only has five accomplishments in this area:
Two are rather pedestrian: a donation program of fishing and hunting licenses for wounded warriors and Gold Star family members and a 50 percent discount on hunting and fishing licenses to Maryland Purple Heart recipients. Two bills that do assist veterans and wounded warriors, but don’t do a lot to improve their quality of life. Another is the creation of a protest buffer zone around the funeral of a soldier, which is well-intentioned by probably unconstitutional.
Two other ones though show the extent of Simonaire’s hypocrisy and exploitation.
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Simonaire goes on to mention his bill regarding service dogs:
Of course, the veterans-related bill that I am most proud of this year is the veterans suicide prevention legislation that passed with all senators co-sponsoring. This bill will hopefully help reduce the number of suicides among veterans. I am organizing a fall fundraiser to help provide service dogs free of charge to these veterans.
We, of course, have been over this time and time and time again.
- We first talked about this back in March, when we noted that Simonarie’s bill had nothing to do with “Veteran’s Suicide Prevention” and that he is lying when it says it does.
- Simonaire doubled-down on it later that month in an op-ed to the Voice.
- In April, Simonaire again exploited veteran suicides on his Facebook page.
- Then, Simonaire personally attacked me in the Pasadena Voice for calling him out on his shameful behavior.
Why Simonaire continues to go back to this well is beyond me. Maybe it has something to do with his lack of legitimate political accomplishments. Maybe it has something to do with Simonaire trying to distract from the fact that he has repeatedly broken his term limits pledge. Maybe it has to do with the fact that John Leopold and others are considering mounting a primary challenge to him.
But before we reason why, let’s loop back around to the other accomplishment that Simonaire talks about in his Voice op-ed. Well, I’ll let him tell you about it:
Since I took office in Annapolis, I have focused on helping our military. The first bill I passed was the Fallen Soldier’s Privacy Act. This bill protected the fallen soldiers and their family members from being commercially exploited through political rhetoric printed on T-shirts using the fallen soldier’s name.
As far as I know, there wasn’t a whole lot of this going around to start with. However, you have to ask yourself this: how cynical does Bryan Simonaire have to be to point out his bill to stop fallen soldiers from being exploited when he himself is exploiting veteran suicides for political gains?
As always, Bryan Simonaire should be ashamed by his actions. But he’s not, and he continues to cynically and crassly exploit veterans to save his mediocre and endangered political career. His time would be better served taking practical actions, like trying to get better service in VA clinics District 31 where wait times are atrocious, rather than continue to jump use veterans to prop up his political prospects.
