Bonanza Column 151 – Will No One Rid Us of this Noisome Governor?

Will No One Rid Us of this Noisome Governor?

Next Friday, May 8^th, Governor Jim Gibbons will be coming to Incline for a town hall-type meeting. The venue is not determined at this writing, but the D.W. Reynolds Building is a good bet. I imagine Gibbons thinks that a trip to Incline will be a friendly affair. Our community has the reputation of being pretty conservative Republican town (despite having gone for Obama in the election) and it's predictable that a lot of those who turn out will support Gibbons in a knee-jerk conservative kind of way.

Maybe the rest of us should turn out also. As I've said before in this space, this is one of the worst governors in the United States and, just a couple of weeks ago, he got a new title:

Our winner... Governor Jim Gibbons of Nevada.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that the FBI is investigating him for having allegedly accepted unreported gifts or payments from a military contractor, while the Governor was a U.S. Congressman.

But he has an explanation. "I have heard," he says, "that the Democrats have paid to have these Wall Street Journal articles written."

Governor, don't you think, if the Democrats could get good coverage out of the Wall Street Journal by paying for it, they might spend the money on a little higher-value target than the Governor of Nevada?

The Wall Street Journal, for cryin' out loud!

Governor Jim Gibbons of Nevada... Today's Worst Person In The World!"

That was Keith Olbermann on his TV show on April 10^th. Now despite Keith's side-shot at Nevada, we have further evidence that our governor's train is leaving the tracks. The news reporting of the Wall Street Journal, unlike its editorial pages, is among the best in the country. Gibbons' allegation (he later backed off, but it's on the record) that somehow this Republican paper was bribed by unnamed Democrats to malign him borders on paranoid psychosis. This comes on the heels of the latest episode in the ongoing saga of the Governor's divorce with new accusations of infidelity by his wife.

Of course we also have Gibbons' demonstrated incompetence in dealing with the state's budget crisis and his predilection for cutting education, presumably on the assumption that an uneducated electorate is his and his party's best insurance. Then there are the allegations of questionable contributions that are continuing as he raises money for a reelection campaign.

Sooner or later Nevada voters need to wise up. Harry Reid has made a big contribution toward our state not being seen nationally as a two-bit operation supported by gambling and prostitution, but as long as we have a governor who spouts paranoid nonsense, can't manage his domestic relationship with any honor or integrity, and is plagued by allegations of corruption that touch both him and his estranged wife (a Google search on "Gibbons Nevada" and "scandal OR accused" yields 489,000 hits in less than a second and includes names like InTreppid, Ozmen, and others), and as long as we are in the bottom tier of the 50 states in education and in the top tier in things like alcoholism and suicide, we're unlikely to be respected or seen as respectable.