Revisiting Joe Arpaio

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Note: This blog has been delayed by the poaching and shut-down by another entity of the internet account I’ve had with olympus.net since Ned Schumann brought technology to town around 1991. But I’m back, although still without my land-line telephone service that was cancelled without authorization and having fought off an attempted identity theft via my main credit card.  All about the same time last week. 

Donald Trump just found a way to have his cake and eat it too. While tweeting about having compassion for them, he just pulled the rug out from under 800,000 “dreamers” by abandoning DACA (Deferred Action for Children Arrivals). President Barack Obama created DACA through a 2012 executive order. The program has allowed hundreds of thousands of young people who were brought to the United States illegally as children to remain in the country. Applicants cannot have serious criminal histories, and must have arrived in the U.S. before 2007, when they were under the age of 16. DACA recipients have been able to live and work legally in the U.S. for renewable two-year periods.  It all seemed fair and made few waves.

But alas. these eager-for-life souls were not American-born, as was Donald Trump, grandson of a white-skinned euro-American immigrant  born in Germany.

In his double-pronged assault on any initiatives of Obama and on Mexican immigrants in general, Donald found a way to blame Congress if the program is phased out as per his ultimatum. He has given that body six months to come up with a comprehensive immigration plan that might deal with it. Or, if some magnificent solution comes forth through Congress, he then can take credit for it. He offered no constructive leadership of his own.

Before this particular devious disruption and cruel disregard for so many lives, I had already written that the true nature of Donald Trump was reflected some days back in his pardon of Arizona ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio. I viewed that move as an “in your face” display of his power to his critics, and also to the fact that old Joe was one of his earliest campaign supporters. And it was a manifestation of the obvious sociopathic disdain for Mexican immigrants that the two men share. 

Arpaio blatantly racially profiled for more than two decades, rounding up Latinos who “looked like” they might be illegals and consigning them to his tent-city “concentration camp” (as he himself called it). As many as 60 of them died from a combination of beatings, torture and inhuman living conditions that included temperatures reaching 145 degrees.

The system allowed him to walk free was a farcical excuse for a “justice” system. Arizona voters continued to re-elect him, despite evidence of his cruel and inhuman brutality. A Sept. 2 article by  Marianne Shaefer Trench (who filmed a documentary on Arpaio) appeared in The Daily Beast. She described how surveillance cameras showed unruly detainees strapped to chairs and tortured with tasers. That particular thing killed one inmate, and the case was settled for $8.25 million. Trench wrote that at the time of her film project quite a few years ago there were hundreds of lawsuits against all of the sheriff’s divisions, and the department had amassed a total of $14.7 in settlements in the past five years. 

“Yet the majority of Maricopa County residents kept voting for Arpaio and supplied millions of dollars to his campaign efforts . . . When I asked him about human rights, Arpaio said, ‘Human rights violations? Amnesty International? They should all go back where they came from—to Iraq—instead of telling me how to do my  job’.”

Trench continued: “He bragged about his prison tents because, in his opinion, detainees don’t deserve air conditioning during the scorching hot summer months or heat in the cold Arizona winters. His prisoners had to wear striped prison suits and pink underwear. In 2001, brunch was a new fad and Arpaio decided he should imitate the trend and cut down the three rotten daily prison meals to two. The women in the tent cities told me horrifying stories about the lack of medical attention. One woman in a tent claimed she had a miscarriage in her fifth month of pregnancy, without ever getting medical help.

“I witnessed the brutality of it all. Arpaio said he believed in equal rights for women, so women were also put into striped suits and chain gangs. I took my mutinous crew and accompanied the women to their workplace—an empty, windswept stretch of desert, the paupers’ graveyard. Their duty was to dig graves. As they were shoveling dirt onto a coffin, all the women cried. They told me they were afraid that one day they would end up just like this. One woman sobbed harder than the others. She told me she had buried her own father in one of these graves.”

Arpaio’s infamous “posse” became well known during the Obama administration, as the members were all “birthers” who (like Donald Trump. Yes, him again) worked hard trying to prove Obama was not born in the U.S.  At one time, some 3,600 individuals had strapped on a gun and had a star slapped onto them by Arpaio—and went out to patrol the streets, frequently singling out Hispanics.

Arpaio was sheriff for 24 years before being voted out of office in November. Finally on July 31 this year he was convicted of a crime—but only a contempt-of-court misdemeanor (and not for his vicious and deadly use of law-enforcement power.)

And Donald Trump just pardoned him of that even before he’d been sentenced.  Trench concluded: “It’s not surprising that Arpaio is Trump’s soul mate. In my mind, the real scandal is that I met this man 16 years ago and knew he was evil to the bone. Yet he stayed in office and was able to flout the law, the Constitution, and basic human rights for 24 years. And he doesn’t have to pay for any of it.”

My usual critics by this point will be dismissing these observations as my “hatred” of Donald Trump. No. I refuse to yield to outright “hatred.” My mind just turns with utter disgust, contempt and repugnance to the old axiom that “birds of a feather flock together.”  Also, “leopards don’t change their spots.”

We can recall Donald back to the beginning of his campaign when he ranted and raved about illegal Mexican immigrants being “criminals . . . rapists.” I guess he hit a hot scare button with that  “rapist” bit. Sorry, Donald, it was your character that really showed through. Then, of course, there’s his vision of a great wall between two countries—to separate the yearning “losers” from complacent well-to-do white supremacists such as himself.

DACA was a nice-working creative and humane immigration-related program until Trump was elected. Then it became a target. But of course the program had an Obama label on it—and it also didn’t fit well with that mental gated community in which Donald chooses to pursue his own existence. Donald also remains obsessed with his Great Border Wall monument to himself.

While his political experience was zero, his racist inclinations go back through his entire adult life. His “no blacks need apply” policy, for instance, is well documented and dates to when he took over his father’s apartment-rental empire in New York City. Lately he even has gone so far as to squelch the plan, dating from Obama’s treasury department, to put black abolitionist Harriet Tubman (a woman!) on the $20 bill in place of his idol Andrew Jackson. She’d be better on the $2 bill, said Donald. Yeah, sure. Where it would be a rare day indeed when anyone ever saw her image.

Then there is the ongoing Muslim terrorist fear campaign (presently sort of on the back burner) . . . Charlottesville . . . and there have been so many other manifestations along the way of Donald’s self-bestowed personal supremacy.

But back to another dose of Old Joe.  You couldn't pay me enough money to get me to live anywhere near Maricopa County, Arizona, where the spirit of evil still lingers. The same pretty much goes for the neighborhoods of fancy monuments to Donald’s personal prosperity that dot this country and other parts of the world in a pathetic reach for the immortality of his self-exalted being.

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