The newspaper, in a front-page article on Oct. 21, “LePage has eyes on welfare abuse,” reports that Gov. Paul LePage attended a “town hall” meeting at Mount View High School in Thorndike the even-ing before.

In the article, it reports, “LePage took a difficult question about midway through the program when Catherine Burns of Skowhegan, who said her son Sgt. Brett Pelotte died of a heart attack while on active military duty in 2003, asked the governor why he didn’t serve in Vietnam.”

With all due respect to the newspaper, “difficult” is hardly a word I would use to characterize Burns’ “question.”

For starters, when did serving in the armed services become a prerequisite to holding public office?

One can only speculate as to what Burns’ true motivations were for driving 35 miles to attend this town hall meeting.

Furthermore, to invoke the name of her deceased son as a means of launching a personal attack on the governor was both disgusting and reprehensible.

Reasonable people will conclude that Burns’ sole objective for attending this meeting was to attempt to humiliate the governor in a public setting, but succeeding, instead, to make a fool of herself.

What the newspaper refers to as a difficult question by Burns wasn’t a question at all, but rather a poorly veiled political statement by an obvious opponent.

Paul DeRosby, Waterville