As Chattanooga area residents rush to buy, thaw, stuff and cook their turkeys in preparation for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving feast, the Free Press editorial page thought it was a good time to roast a few turkeys ourselves.
Our turkeys, however, aren’t the succulent highlight of a lovingly prepared family meal. Instead, these five turkeys are the people and organizations that we would be thankful to do without. These turkeys have gobbled tax dollars, laid an egg when it comes to job performance and pecked away at our patience.
The five “2012 Chattanooga Turkeys of the Year” are:
1) Rep. Scott DesJarlais: The Congressman representing Tennessee’s 4th District made international news for hypocrisy of the highest order. By the doctor-turned-politician’s own admission, he had sexual relationships with two patients, three coworkers and a pharmaceutical saleswoman. He also apparently was the impregnating party in at least two, but likely three, pregnancies that ended in abortion, used illegal drugs, improperly prescribed pills for a sexual partner and put his ex-wife in a very scary situation involving a gun. All this despite championing a pro-life, pro-family, socially conservative platform.
2) EPB Fiber Optics: Since launching its plan to compete against private business with a government-owned taxpayer-funded cable, Internet and telephone scheme, the infrastructure to provide the service has cost taxpayers and customers $552 million. Despite claims about how EPB’s Gig — a one gigabit-per-second fiber Internet capability — would revolutionize Chattanooga, not a single business has moved to the area because of the service and there remains skepticism about whether EPB can actually provide a Gig if anyone actually needed it.