Daily Archives: June 27, 2023

He Was the Very Model of a Modern Major-General

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He was way, waaaaay worse than we realized.

And we already knew he was pretty bad.

And he was, somehow, a legit national figure in his field.

Submitted for your consideration: Bill Bohnyak, former Orange County Sheriff and second runner-up in the Tunbridge Fair’s hotly-contested Alexander Lukashenko Lookalike Contest, now revealed to be a financial mismanager on an epic scale.

Reminder: This guy was president of the National Sheriffs’ Association. Well, he was until he somehow managed to lose his bid for re-election last year, after which he no longer qualified to hold the position. In the past I’ve wondered if Vermont really needed sheriffs at all; if Bohnyak was a prominent national leader of his kind, I wonder if the whole country would be better off without them. Actually, check that. I don’t wonder. I’m convinced.

Bohnyak was also a frequent and respected presence in the Statehouse, strutting around in his physics-defyingly skin-tight uniforms, advocating for the interests of law enforcement in general and the sheriffs in particular.

And now here we are, with auditors throwing up their hands and walking away from a mandatory audit of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department because its financial records were a complete shambles.

Credit to his profession, I tell you.

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Exit His Excellency

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Hat tip to former Green Mountain Daily comrade Apache Trout for putting a bow on the tenure of outgoing Bishop Christopher Coyne of the Catholic Church’s once-powerful Burlington Diocese. Coyne is a true loyalist who did his level best (within the bounds of his ideological worldview) to stabilize the Diocese and perhaps even restore some of its former glory.

Indeed, Vermont was nowhere near the stinkiest set of stables Coyne was tasked with mucking out. He came to Burlington from the Archdiocese of Boston, where he occupied the thankless role of spokesperson during the dismal days of that precinct’s child sex abuse scandal.

The raw statistics show that Coyne was not only unable to reverse the Church’s fortunes, he wasn’t even able to slow the downward momentum. Worse than the membership numbers cited above are the vanishing priesthood (from 276 ordained priests in 1975 to a mere 36 today) and the number of active parishes (from 130 in 2001 to 68 today).

This, for a diocese that used to be a real political power in Vermont and was reduced to making feeble noises of protest during last year’s overwhelmingly successful Proposition 5 campaign.

But then, as Apache Trout noted, the diocese has no one but itself to blame for the dissipation of its moral and social authority.

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