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Fife: our next ex-governor
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Republican Fife Symington, our governor, epitomizes all the qualities of a crooked politician. One who should not be governor. He is dishonest, evasive, and seems to think that the taxpayers of this state should help him pay the legal bills for his own il legal activities. This - and the fact that he beat out a perfectly good businessman, Eddie Basha, on the platform that Symington himself was the better businessman for the job - reeks of irony. Especially since he is a failed businessman from long before the election.
Now that he is on trial with 23 federal charges against him, he has even less political rope to swing on in this state. So what does he do? He cuts another few feet off of it himself, and he can't even realize why his actions were so degrading to himself and his office.
The story starts a few months back with some inexplicable lights in the sky over the Phoenix area. To date, no one has been able to figure out what the lights were. Some say UFO's.
June 19, enter our governor. He says solemnly, thoughtfully, to the entire press corps at the state Capitol, that the state is going to look into the lights. Furthermore, he said that it was an intriguing problem, and that the Arizona Department of Transp ortation would be the agency to head the investigation of this issue.
Then the governor comes back later in the day and says it was all a joke. This, to the point that he had a member of his staff dress up as an alien. Aside from the total lack of dignity in perpetuating a hoax on the people in Arizona, we paid for this! We the taxpayers are footing the actual bill for the governor to pull one over on the media, and ourselves.
No public official should be able to get away with this kind of crap at taxpayer expense. Without even mentioning the fact that our highest elected official should be above this kind of immature, crass, behavior in the first place. This is just another ex ample of why Symington needs to hand the reins over to Secretary of State Jane Dee Hull as soon as possible. We need a real governor in this state, and Symington keeps proving why with stupid stunts like this.
Andrew Benjamin is a senior majoring in American Literature
