Gov. Jim Gibbons has long been the brightest, boldest, LED-video billboard for his own impeachment. If he’s not lying to the public about why he was sworn in (thus birthing his administration into a proud tradition of lies), he’s appointing all the wrong people to all the wrong jobs.

But today’s little verbal misadventure — captured by our colleague Anjeanette Damon of the Reno Gazette-Journal — forges new ground. In short: The governor is either a liar or criminally misinformed. Either way, it’s clear he’s no longer fit to helm the state, if he ever was.

Let’s do the quotes, from Damon’s story today:

Following his speech at the Washoe County Republican Convention, Gibbons expressed concern that people will not seek important medical procedures because of the “buffoonery” of the state’s press corps.

“This hysteria has been created by people not getting the right information,” Gibbons said. “The fact is they haven’t found more than those six people (who contracted hepatitis C).”

Actually, governor, the fact is, “they” haven’t found more than those six people yet. Medical authorities have advised at least 40,000 people to be tested, and we know that’s a partial list, since the clinic in question provided health authorities with an incomplete list of patients it may have exposed to disease. Test results for many people have yet to come back. (FULL DISCLOSURE: Our wife is one of the people who was advised to get tested after a procedure at one of the now-shuttered clinics.)

But even if those six people were the only ones to be affected by intentionally negligent cost-saving procedures, it’s still a goddamn outrage, for those of us humans still capable of feeling that emotion. This is, after all, the largest health advisory in national history, something that medical professionals, not the media, decided to institute.

Alas, the governor was just getting started. More:

Gibbons defended the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada, saying that if the doctors and nurses there had been grossly negligent, more cases of hepatitis C would have been discovered by now.

“In the normal population, 1.8 percent of people have hepatitis C. If you have 40,000 people (in danger) we should’ve found at least, what, 700 people with hepatitis C,” he said.

“There was no single-vial of medication reused. There were no reused needles. Gross negligence when you have far below the number of average (hepatitis C) cases listed? That’s trial lawyer speak to me. I think if you’d had gross negligence, you’d have a higher number.”

Here we must note two things: One, the owner of the Endoscopy Center is Dr. Dipak Desai, who served on one of Gibbons’s many transition teams. Two, the governor is lying his ass off.

How can we say that? It’s been repeatedly reported that there was routine re-use of single-use vials of medicine. And while needles were not reused, the attached syringes were, which is precisely how infection may have spread.

That’s not media buffonery. That’s fact, as witnessed by health district investigators. Or does the governor think that trial lawyers got to the Southern Nevada Health District and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and persuaded authorities there to make the whole thing up?

So, why do we not give Gibbons the benefit of the doubt, and allow that he merely may have misspoken? Because the uncontradicted reports of those health district investigators have been in general circulation for weeks. The governor has no doubt seen them, and been briefed by his own people about the crisis. He knows what happened, or at least he should.

Which brings us to this: “That’s trial-lawyer speak to me.”

It’s an odd phrase, given that the governor himself has a law degree. But as a Republican, he naturally hates trial lawyers. And so the chief executive of the state carries a brief publicly for a doctor who served on one of his transition teams, by publicly asserting facts that are untrue, because his political agenda tells him that doctors are good, while the media and trial lawyers are bad.
We’ll say it again: The governor appears to us to be willfully ignoring and distorting facts to serve his political agenda. And that agenda has so enfeebled his mind, he cannot possibly be trusted to lead this state, especially where vital matters of public health are concerned.

The governor is entitled to his philosophy, as fanciful and faith-based as it may be. He’s not entitled to lie or mislead the public, however. For that, he should apologize. And because it hasn’t really dawned on him yet, perhaps someone of good character and patriotism could approach the governor and gently suggest it may be in everybody’s interest if he clears the way for a more responsible — and reality-based –  leader to take the helm?

We’d totally forgotten a somewhat unusual experience we had at the Clark County Republican Party convention on March 8, until we read the Sunday column of our colleague Erin Neff in the Review-Journal.

After we got to the event at The Orleans, we were issued press credentials attached to a lanyard that we admit we paid no attention to whatsoever. But as we and a colleague were walking out of the convention area for lunch, we were confronted by a young lady who demanded we hand back those credentials.

We balked, knowing that we’d be returning shortly and would need that badge to get by security in order to get to the press box, situated above the convention floor and well away from anybody we might want to pester with questions. (Even so, delegates had been told to let trained party people talk to the press.) The young lady pressed, saying she’d need to at least get the lanyard back.

That’s odd, we thought. Were they running short of lanyards? We dutifully handed it back, which seem to satisfy her.

It turns out, as Neff reported, the lanyards bore the website of a porn company! Luckily for us, Neff got out of the convention before the leadership noticed and began demanding everybody hand them back in!

Well, that does it. From now on, we’re going to get our own porn-advertising lanyard, and wear it with the credentials they give us at every political convention from here on out! Any porn people out there want to make bids? We’ll wear the lanyard of the highest bidder!

And don’t worry, Clark County Republicans. We don’t think less of you because of this incident. In fact, had it been intentional, we might have thought more of you. But we’ll just keep this little incident between us, and, of course, the R-J’s Sunday readership.