Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio announced that his office will not cooperate with a Department of Justice investigation into allegations that his controversial immigration sweeps employ racial profiling.
Why you remember Sheriff Joe, right? He made prison inmates march in pink underwear in front of cameras to a new jail, boasts about how cheaply he feeds them, pals around with white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Just a heck of a guy.
But now he’s gone and told DOJ to go screw themselves. Joe, Joe, Joe. That’s just going to piss them off. Remember what happened to John Gotti when he started thumbing his nose at the feds? Two hung juries, but then a conviction. He died in prison.
I’ve always thought that though these people like Arpaio are detestable a-holes, a hell of a lot more can be said about the backwards people that agrees and votes for them.
Before you condemn the voters, read “Deer Hunting with Jesus,” which Bob has reviewed on this site. In rural areas, guys like Arpaio get elected not so much because people like them, but because they understand the needs and concerns of rural culture (and too many liberals don’t). A blanket statement about “backwards people” ain’t gonna win you any friends in my neck of the woods.
OTOH, Maricopa County has 3.6 million people and contains the fast-growing cities of Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa and Tempe. So maybe it’s not those backward rural folks after all, but folks from other cities in other states who’ve moved to the New West?
DJ, I’ve read the book, and lived in Rural areas. Tell me, how does starving and degrading people in prison meet the “needs and concerns of rural culture”? Or how rural culture has at it’s roots racism and a neo-nazi foundation? It doesn’t.
Fact of the matter is that many rural folks have been sucked into such hate machines via the artificial line of thought (promoted by Rush and other such right-wingnuts) that conservative people should all hate anyone that disagrees with the “conservative” viewpoint. The problem is that the culture has shifted from what used to be a reasonable, conservative, small-town mindset to the ultra-right selfish “I want mine and screw the rest of you” mindset that’s been wearing the sheepskin of “conservatism” and dancing about in the media for the past decade. The fact that I know farmers that bitch about taxation and “migrant workers on welfare”, but find no problem with taking subsidy checks from the government, speaks volumes for how hypocritical rural culture has become.
Regardless of who’s voting for this idiot, it’s the mindset that what he’s doing is OK that’s at fault here, not where the people that voted for him live. And I don’t think Daniel specified if those people were rural, suburban or urban in nature. Though I have no doubt that rural votes (along with “conservative” suburban NIMBYs) made up the lions share in this case.