Did you just donate $50,000 to John Cannon's Reelection?

 By Thornton Crowe

This week's latest dust up occurring within our Wicomico County government was a fabulous display of danger play for which John Cannon clearly has no finesse to pull off political operative missions! Rough & tumble, indeed.

This cunning but sloppy fraud investigation against the Executive Office, claiming there was some evil plot afoot regarding a pay raise for an employee that seemed dodgy, was merely an attempt to garner free PR for the councilman's reelection in 2018 - nothing more!

Enter, the Never-Ending Gobstopper...

Funny enough, his entire escapade was centered solely on the word of a disgruntled employee who was shown the door last May; but those trivialities are always too inconvenient to entertain. Hence, this whole 'investigation' reeks of the kind of antics those in eternal campaign mode often pull to weaken their opponents while trying to promote themselves as some kind of hero to the people!


Oddly (or not so much), we never hear a peep from or see Cannon until it's time to dust off those old yard signs, crank up the fundraiser machine and, once again, vie for another popularity contest for some elected government position. No doubt, this will not be the end of taking you on an emotional rollercoaster until a year from next November!

By exploiting the lies about county procedures from a malcontent looking to exact revenge, he was able to pull off this 'forensic' machination which only led us into a fairy tale of nothingness, producing another nothing burger, of course, at our expense.

Congratulations, Mr. & Ms. Wicomico Taxpayer, you are officially Johnny's biggest contributor...

Interesting how, once we learned the real deal from evidence, it was all backsliding from there. In true form (from watching too many Political Animal episodes on Netflix), like a good Democrat - Republican - Cannon doubled down on horse manure with tons of ketchup on the side. In short, he blew it off saying to some adoring WBOC camera crew, "It's now up to the voters to decide." Really? Could we be any more explicit?

Throwing around criminality like fraud is always a nifty, heavy-handed tactic, but sophisticated political operatives know, one has to have real evidence (or at least, really good fakeries) to make the rubbish stick in public opinion. Otherwise, one ends up with stinky eggs are abound; making one look like a fool more than a hero. Cannon just wasted in excessive of $50K of your money to play the County fool! Can we get a refund?

Does the County Charter have a stipulation against this type of covert action with our tax money or are we expected to foot these kind of campaign bills every time a Council person is up for re-election?

It would seem this type of power abuse runs counter to any ethics code and should be subject to sanction against Cannon for such brazen corruption.

Furthermore, why would his fellow council members be so acquiescent to his reindeer games even when they apparently knew the truth before the hearing last Wednesday? Are they trying to follow Cannon down the political suicide road? Perhaps they need to step back from the schoolyard bully and take stock in their own win/lose continuum here.

As for Liz Holland at the Daily Times: pimping for one candidate at the expense of your journalistic integrity is most irresponsible and underwhelming. Real journalism entails geting all sides of the story - quoting both accurately - instead of assisting this local balderdash. Your clip portfolio will surely suffer greatly should you allow yourself to be played every time Cannon gets a bee up his bonnet and decides to take us all down another political rabbit hole, leading to nowhere.

Stay tune for more shills, spills and chills, folks, as surely, we'll see more pricy election-motivated 'investigations' or other such nonsense while Cannon tries to run his next campaign on your dime!