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VP Pence Honors Sheriff Joe the Criminal
Yesterday, Vice President Mike Pence said the following about Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona during a tax policy event:
"I'm honored to have you here."
Vice President Mike Pence recognizes ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio during a tax policy event in Arizona, calling Arpaio a "tireless champion of strong borders and the rule of law." pic.twitter.com/tzmS3sKPnN
— NBC News (@NBCNews) May 1, 2018
It is horrifying for anyone to honor Sheriff Joe in any manner, especially in regard to how he conducted himself as a gatekeeper for the rule of law in his home state of Arizona.
Joe Arpaio isn’t your average huckster in the conservative movement; out to make some bombastic statements in order to fundraise off of them. He’s no Matt Schlapp; your average grifter raising outrage and money in Washington before laughing all the way to the bank.
No, Arpaio is something far more sinister and every patriotic American should make clear his actions while acting as The Law in Arizona were un-American and sickening. Arpaio used to joke about running a concentraion camp, and he wasn’t that far off from the mark. Several years ago the Phoenix New Times reported,
Since he was elected sheriff in 1993, county taxpayers have shelled out more than $140 million to litigate — and ultimately settle — claims of brutality by the sheriff’s deputies. Lawsuits charge that the sheriff has cultivated a “culture of cruelty” motivated by Arpaio’s incessant trumpeting that he is America’s toughest lawman.
But even if you could kill and maim the indigent and the lawless for free, do we really want a medieval penal system?
So it is a simple, if morbid, question: How many body bags?
Sheriff Joe Arpaio has refused to answer. His spokesman, Lieutenant Brandon James, said doing the math would take a few weeks.
It’s been six months.
Searching other databases (the Office of the County Medical Examiner’s and the Office of Risk Management’s, as well as the U.S. Department of Justice’s) revealed that close to 160 people have died in Arpaio’s jails.
But that is an estimate, because the truth is that no outside authority keeps track of how many people die from brutality, neglect, disease, bad health, or old age in Arpaio’s jails.
There is a difference between doing time and killing people. Yes, jail shouldn’t be comfortable, but it also shouldn’t be callously indifferent towards conditions which have killed prisoners.
What is perhaps more disturbing than the fact that the Vice President lauded a man like Joe Arpaio is that so few of Pence’s inner circle or supporters find any issue with the statements. Arpaio is viewed as a hero simply because he was able to convincingly swagger while acting tough, with his deputies having prisoners rot inside tents that reached 138 degrees in heat waves. The conditions in Tent City, which was Arpaio’s baby, were textbook definition of cruel and unusual.
Even if you care little for prisoners rotting inside an outdoor tent prison, there’s plenty more evidence Sheriff Joe Arpaio was hardly an effective law enforcer. Here’s more from the Guardian about his tenure:
The sheriff botched the investigation into the rape of a 13-year-old girl and failed to arrest the suspect who then went on to sexually attack her again.
The girl’s rape case was among more than 400 sex-crime cases that were inadequately investigated or not looked into at all by Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office during a three-year period ending in 2007.
Sheriff’s spokeswoman Lisa Allen says Arpaio’s office agrees with the decision to resolve the lawsuit.
The botched investigations served as an embarrassment for Arpaio, who promotes himself as “America’s toughest sheriff”.
The Phoenix New Times created an essential and shocking breakdown of their 20 year coverage of the Sheriff, available here:
Things to know about Joe Arpaio now that Trump has pardoned him.
He isn’t just bad at his job, he is a bad person. He may play the media as well as President Trump, who the media treats like a monster, but Arpaio happens to be exactly as bad as he’s portrayed. Continuing to eleveate his profile is a sickening reminder that for many in the Trump administration, being antagonistic and promoting those the media hates is more important than basic morality.
Published in Law
Other than taxes and price fixing, what is a liberal victory? Are you saying the USSR was an American Liberal Victory? Really? Al-Qaeda was an American Liberal Victory?
Price fixing is still seen as a solution to gas prices.
Nothing you have offered is an undoing of the Progressive Project. There is not one victory over the Progressive Project since 1937. All the right has done is slow it down.
I don’t support the guy, I just am unwilling to bash Pence over one line. Good Lord, I am against disowning people based on a statement or two. I thought conservatives were against that too.
His Federal conviction concerns racial profiling. Outside of that his political corruption unit, which was designed to punish County Supervisors, judges, and lower level county employees that disagreed with Arpaio cost Maricopa County 44 million dollars in staff time, and lawsuit settlements. The Maricopa County attorney that worked with Sheriff Arpaio was disbarred. 11 lawsuits were brought against the unit, and the county had to pay out on everyone of them.
According to Jon Gabriel’s article some months back it’s pretty clear that there was continuing harassment of native-born American citizens who are Hispanic, but let’s put that one on the back burner for now, as it’s probably a lengthy process to make the case on that charge. What do you think of the assassination attempt hoax? I don’t give a hoot if the sheriff is loved or hated by the left or right. When a sheriff spends public money to have his deputies entrap and frame someone for a phony assassination attempt so said sheriff can get his name in the headlines, that guy deserves to go to prison. A man spent four years in jail until he was acquitted of the plot.
Arpaio’s no hero of mine, and he’s no hero to any conservatives who I know. He’s never done any good for us and we owe him nothing.
The stuff about the pink underwear and the baloney sandwiches? Sure, it seemed funny once upon a time.
If I remember correctly that lawsuit cost Maricopa about 1 million dollars.
Appeasement of the USSR, and resignation to their ever-increasing influence, was definitely an unstated plank of the American liberal project, especially after 1968. “Understanding Al-Qaeda” and what “drove these people to terrorism” was also a big liberal idea after 9-11. Whereas “we win, they lose” for the USSR and Al-Qaeda was the conservative position.
And if you acknowledge taxes and price-fixing as “liberal victories”, do you see their demise after the 70’s and 80’s, respectively, as “not undoing the Progressive Project,” since they might come back at some future time?
As a former LEO I don’t even approve of field sobriety check points. What was going on with the checkpoints in Maricopa County was if you looked like you were Hispanic you were detained and questioned. Everyone else was waved through. That’s rough sell, especially in a state like Arizona. There are families of Hispanic descent that have been in Arizona before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. Not too mention the fact that to stop a motorist requires a traffic violation to initiate a stop and a detention. Border Patrol check points stop everyone near the border, but you are only detained long enough for the drug dog to walk past your vehicle. I’ve seen vehicles pulled out of line, but they are enforcing Federal law.
Progressivism keeps the ground it takes over decades. I’ll spare you my usual blather on this topic.
What do I think? I think it’s from the same compromised source on which Bethany has already wasted far too much Ricochet space reselling.
There must be a lot of compromised sources. Doing a search for James Saville Joe Arpaio returns quite a few hits and at a quick glance, each one seems to accept the court’s finding that James Saville was framed for a plot that was dreamed up by Arpaio’s sheriff’s department. I wonder if they are all lying about the court’s findings or if they are telling the truth but the courts in Arizona are all corrupt and just like picking on America’s Toughest Sheriff.
First source on the search is Phoenix New Times.
Yep. They can all be undone in a heartbeat. Medicare will never go away. Public School will always be dictated to by DC. The EPA will only get worse.
I want a win as solid and lasting as Medicare. The GOP expanded Medicare.
We may have won the cold war, but so what? The left continues, unabated, its destruction of America.
And the Right helps it along. Does not even bother to fight. The GOP could have undone Obamacare, they did not want too.
Criticize Arpaio. Say it’s unwise for our politicians to endorse him.
But for crying out loud, you people like Pence. Can you save your outrage directed at him for something more serious that what could easily be chalked up to diplomatic niceties that politicians and the politic frequently engage in as part and parcel of the political arrangement?
Or do you want Pence to turn into Trump and be un vice-presidential and say insulting things on Twitter?
You want a “win” as solid and lasting as Medicare? If you listen to the left, every election they tell their voters it can be “undone in a heartbeat.” Your insistence that price-fixing and 70%+ tax rates are just around the corner is as delusional as the Paul-Ryan-pushes-grandma-off-a-cliff ad.
And destroying the USSR is the single best thing that’s happened for the world since 1945. By defeating them we brought half the world out of slavery. Europe, Africa, and Latin America are free from foreign domination, and Russia and China’s meddling in the Middle East and Asia is nothing compared to what the USSR used to do. We won. Anticommunism lit the intellectual fire that started the conservative movement, and it was the glue that held the free marketers, defense hawks, and social conservatives together. To say “so what” to that is as ridiculous as saying “so what we beat the Nazis in WWII, David Duke still continues, unabated, in his destruction of America.”
You say it, Lazy. And keep on saying it. To write the words “so what?” that we won the cold war is disgusting. By doing that, we possible saved lives. Untold numbers of them. And thanks to Reagan, millions around the world live in more freedom. And they are prosperous. The answer I got back when I praised was deafening silence, because he could not answer. All the apologists for Trump know is fighting, and “winning”. What have they won? When Congress goes Democrat again, it will with the aide of these Trump apologists. And then we can thank them for bringing on the Left with a vengeance. The very people they claim to want to defeat will be back in the saddle again. And it will all be because of the them. Let’s hope these Fake Conservatives can live with that.
The end of the Korean War.
The circular firing squad rides again.
Exactly. Not one of these items is a victory against the domestic Left. Al-Qaeda? Islam is not leftist. Obviously, the government did not have a monopoly on telephone service. Wage and price controls were instituted by Richard Nixon, who specifically controlled gasoline prices, resulting in shortages. So, reversing a policy of Nixon (a Republican) is one of your signature victories against the Left? The top tax rate reached a local minimum under Reagan but has been creeping up since the. This simply goes to show that the victories are not “forever.” Not even close.
Meanwhile, the Left has succeeded in its long march through the institutions, controlling the media, the universities, primary education. Free speech is under broad attack by the Left. If this is what victory looks like…
When one company has a pure monopoly for decades, offers no innovation, and is very friendly with government “regulators” and legislators, I consider it a win for conservatives when that company is broken up. Having each industry run as a highly-regulated monopoly or with under a dozen large “competitors” is a long-term progressive goal.
Nixon didn’t care about domestic policy, and so instituted progressive ideas about how to fix things. Ending government setting gas prices was a big win, as it heralded the change in philosophy away from government setting prices. The same shift in philosophy accompanied Reagan breaking the air-traffic-control strike. Today the only prices the government set are for things the government pay for (Medicare/Medicaide), or for obvious crony subsidies (ag regulations). Price-fixing is no longer seen as a “solution.”
Marginal tax rates remain much lower than their peaks. Going from 25%-39% doesn’t invalidate getting it down from 70%+ in the 70’s (and 90%+ in the 40’s).
The “long march through the institutions” was already accomplished by the 1950’s. The conservative failure to “roll it back” is real, but the conservative movement can’t be blamed for not preventing it in the first place, since it was already done by the time the conservative movement appeared on the scene.
This is great analysis. They never really deal with it either. Nothing is going to get better until after Western governments can’t float their bonds anymore.
All these things counted as wins will be undone once the population is adequately replace/ watered down by our 3rd world democrat replacements.
Conservative inc could of stopped it and chose to inable it.
This will be our undoing and I lay it at the feet of the Republican establishment. Guilty.
It’s usually not wise to say never. However, Trump is likely the last Republican President. I am in my 50’s. If we don’t crash, there is probably enough liberty for me and my wife to enjoy. My grandchildren are certainly screwed, if not my children.
Too bad the ones we trusted to man the gates, deceived us.
Who knows everything? Me!
The GOP has never been strategic about this stuff, ever, and now we pay.
If you want to understand reality, I cannot recommend enough watching the interviews on Real Vision of David Stockman and Harald Malmgren (the guy from the tweet). You can get a free seven day pass.
The damage was done way before Ronald Reagan and his priority was beating the Soviets. The GOP should’ve gotten massively strategic right after the fall of the Berlin wall. They didn’t. My side has the guns, thank God.
I said what my criteria are for a “win” and y’all have not shown it.
Defeating the USSR was something the left at the time was mostly for. Used to be, Democrats were willing to fight the Commies. JFK anyone? Truman anyone?
No, Reagan did a great job with ending the Cold War. I will grant that. But that prevented him from stopping the progressives here at home.
Exactly, he wanted to wipe out the Fed dual mandate–which is huge fuel for progressive policy— but he just had too much on his plate. Plus Donald Reagan, because he was from Wall Street, wouldn’t hear of it.
Just to clarify: What would “stopping the progressives” look like?
See #54. People can’t take care of themselves because there isn’t enough disbursed prosperity. The entitlement bomb gets worse and worse. You are stupid to not get in on the graft and rent seeking.
Besides, President Reagan was the original “outsider”. The Establishment wanted Gerald Ford first … and George HW Bush was their next choice …
President Reagan took the microphone away from them and the entrenched consultant class … he wasn’t given it by them.
It was only later that they tried to pretend that he was “theirs” from the beginning.