Whether you think Sheriff Joe Arpaio is a racist thug or a noble patriot — I’m all for enforcing immigration laws, but I lean more toward the former than the latter — you have to admit it’s pretty crazy that Trump pardoned him. Even Arpaio couldn’t believe it at first!
Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Michael Kiefer, Arizona Republic:
When Joe Arpaio’s attorney first showed him the presidential pardon, the former sheriff’s first reaction was to ask if it was a fake…
When [attorney Mark] Goldman arrived at Arpaio’s house, he showed him an emailed copy of the document, titled “Executive Grant of Clemency…”
Arpaio looked at it and asked out loud, “Is this a fake?”
Like Obama’s birth certificate, I guess?*
As with so much I see in the Trump era, I’m ambivalent about this pardon. I never had any great hopes that Trump would suddenly start showing good judgment just because he took the oath of office, so it’s impossible for him to disappoint me. I don’t think this pardon was the right thing to do, and I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it. He’s the president. He gets to do this.
The people who are screaming at me that this is an outrage are the same people who screamed about “Covfefe” for a week, and at this point I’m just too tired to care. Aesop was right.
Sorry, Dems. While you were encouraging the GOP to nominate this guy, I was begging them not to. If you don’t like Joe Arpaio getting a presidential pardon, you have nobody to blame but yourselves. You shouldn’t have nominated that awful, awful woman.
*This is a joke. As we now know, when Obama claimed he was born in Kenya, he was lying.