Tag Archives: Doug DiSabito

We’ve Got Multiple Prosecutors Driving Drunk, and Somehow the Problem is Sarah Fair George

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It’s another sad chapter in our ongoing saga of misdeeds by county-level officials in Vermont. This time it’s Grand Isle State’s Attorney Doug DiSabito, busted for drunk driving inside the Franklin County courthouse.

DiSabito, for those unfamiliar, is one of Vermont’s loudest voices for law-n-order. Except maybe when it applies to himself.

News of his arrest came just a few days after Addison County State’s Attorney Eva Vekos had her law license suspended by the state Supreme Court following her own drunk driving conviction.

Addison to the south… Grand Isle to the north… and right there in between is Chittenden County, where the unacceptably progressive Sarah Fair George is once again under attack from within her own party. I guess it’s okay to rack up the DUIs as long as you do your best to keep poor folks behind bars. Priorities.

In the case of Vekos, it’s almost certainly a matter of months before she’s turfed out. She hasn’t ruled out a run for re-election, but at least one challenger has already entered the fray. If she doesn’t get her license back, it’ll be quite a stretch for her to seek another four years on a job she is currently unable to perform*, although stranger things have certainly happened with county-level elected officials.

*I know, she can continue to do paperwork and stuff, but she can’t do a damn thing in court.

DiSabito, on the other hand, has been in office since 2014 and has not faced significant opposition since his first primary. In 2022 he ran on the Democratic and Republican tickets, and he has announced his plan to do the same this year.

Will anyone pull a Bram Kranichfeld and give this guy a run for his money? Somehow, I doubt it. And even if they did, no one has ever gone broke underestimating the intelligence of voters in county elections.

I must stipulate that DiSabito has merely been arrested. (Inside a courthouse!) He deserves the presumption of innocence until his case is heard. But it’s hard to take him seriously as a force for law-n-order if he’s engaging in behavior that not only breaks the law, but actively endangers everyone who shares the public roadways with him.

Allegedly.

All the Tropes, All the Dog Whistles

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I am not bound by the journalistic tradition of staying away from political reporting while the polls are open, and there are a couple things I’m itching to write about: Whether Molly Gray is burning every available bridge in the desperate closing days of her campaign, and how Ted Kenney’s stand on substance abuse reveals him to be unqualified for the position he seeks.

But Gray and Kenney won’t be relevant much longer, and Kenney’s statement is only the second stupidest I’ve seen from a Vermont lawyer this week.

Number one with a (metaphorical) bullet is Grand Isle State’s Attorney Doug DiSabito’s letter depicting Burlington as a lawless hellhole with gunfights and stickups around every corner and no home safe from invasion. The letter he was so proud of that he posted it on Twitter. Good God.

I was 13 years old in 1967. Two years earlier, my family had moved from the placid provinces of western Michigan to a Detroit suburb. Then the ’67 riots happened.

It was an upscale burb, but we lived only seven miles away from the Detroit border. My mom kind of freaked out, believing (as many suburbanites did) that the angry hordes would tire of burning their own neighborhoods and storm en masse up Woodward Avenue, looting and trashing their way through White Folks World.

It didn’t happen, but a remnant of those days remained: a corner of our basement where my mom loaded up the shelves with nonperishable food. You know, to keep us fed in case the supermarkets were all destroyed, deliveries stopped coming, and bands of you-know-who were terrorizing the neighborhoods.

It was serious at the time and more than a little racist, but eventually it became a reserve pantry, a useful add-on to our tiny kitchen.

I see the rotten, fearful spirit of those days in DiSabito’s letter. It’s not pretty.

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