Man, all the trackbacks I’m getting these days is starting to piss me off. Apparently, the Askimet plug-in does not work for them. Anyway…

My local news station, WTNH, and others, had a story the other day about a couple Democratic legislative clerks of an investigations committee in my state’s legislature who were caught on camera ruffling through the desk of the committee’s only Republican legislative clerk.

According to the Republican clerk, she feels they were doing this to intimidate her, letting her know that the state house has a supermajority against the governor, who is also a Republican. However, while part of it may be intimidation, I’m a little skeptical that this is the full story. The clerks work in the office, so they’d have to be dumb not to know the camera was there. Come on, now. Those little half sphere things have been everywhere from offices to shopping malls for years. So, in light of that, the only reason they’d have to go ruffling through the Republican clerk’s stuff is if they knew they would get off pretty easy, which they did. One of them, Rick Lopes, was suspended without pay for three days, and the other was reassigned.

So, mayyybe I’m just paranoid, but I think these guys were directed by someone with influence to do this. Ruffling through someone’s stuff elsewhere? I’m sure you could be fired somewhere else for doing that. However, this is politics, and their party is in power, so it’s not likely much is going to happen to them. Case in point: the whole Congressional page deal in Washington. Nothing happened to that guy until he was ratted out. So, I don’t think the clerks would have done this without knowing they’d be relatively safe. They won’t be fired for doing this, but the Dems have to be seen doing something, so they suspend the guy who seems to be the lead perpetrator, and reassign the other. Done deal, and the Dems save face.

But why? If not just intimidation, why do this? Well, as I said before, this is the office of the committee who investigates misdeeds by, among other things I’m sure, the governor’s administration. Recently, they investigated a women in the governor’s staff. Other than that, this governor has been relatively clean, and for those of you who don’t know, has been a breath of fresh air for the state after the former governor was indicted for using his office to give state contracts to the companies who gave him gifts. So, undoubtedly the Democrats would just loove to find anything else they could on the governor. It might be possible that a Republican clerk would have access to such information if the Republicans knew about it. Yea, maybe it’s a left field theory, but think about it.

Understand that I’m not rooting for the Republicans here. However, nor am I rooting for the Democrats. Both have more or less brushed this under the rug, as far as I can tell. It was whistle-blown, investigated, and the perpetrators got off easy. All I’m saying is that this can’t be all. I’m extremely skeptical of the story as it was told, and I think there’s more to it than what we were told, even if no one, including the Republicans, wants to investigate further. I for one think it may be because nothing was actually taken from the desk. Stuff was just moved around, meaning that even if the clerks were looking for something, they didn’t find anything. If something had been taken, expect that we’d still be hearing about this. So, this incident will end and fade away from public memory quickly, except for me. I’m going to continue to make it my mission to debate the dirty tactics of politics. No politician is safe, and no party can get away from my blog, no matter if you’re the Democrats, the Republicans, or Connecticut for Lieberman (ok, they might run away since Joe doesn’t need them anyway). I’m not saying I’m going to single handedly clean up Congress or the state legislature, but hopefully I can ponder some of the reasons why politicians and parties act they way they do today.