Junk ‘Justice’

Sheriff Joe’s sins are truly unpardonable

You would compare former Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County to Sheriff Buford T. Justice in “Smokey and the Bandit.” But that would be insulting to the goober lawman Jackie Gleason played in that movie.

Now the 85-year-old Arpaio is pardoned by President Trump over a misdemeanor charge about racial profiling that might finally have landed Arpaio in a jail cell.

There have been a lot of bums pardoned by a lot of Presidents across history. Arpaio now takes his place at the front of the line, a different kind of star pinned to his chest.

A guy who made his name across a bindlestiff career because of his contempt for the law — and for the office he once held in Arizona — now gets a soft place to land by the profound legal power of a presidential pardon.

This is absolute power, then, abusing power absolutely for Sheriff Buford T. Arpaio, whose idea of justice was pulling over Latinos for traffic stops, harassing day laborers, targeting enemies of any color, and abusing his prisoners. And that is just the short list. Somehow he was allowed to turn Maricopa County into this kind of redneck banana republic for nearly a quarter-century.

It’s is also worth pointing out that Arpaio, who fancied himself as some kind of American hero and now gets treated by his President as if he’s the victim of the legal system in America, was once a loud, flop-sweat member of the birther movement against President Barack Obama. Obama wasn’t Latino, of course. But for Arpaio, he was close enough. Maybe the amazing thing about Arpaio is that he ever found enough time to worry about the former President around his busy schedule of turning the Constitution into a paper airplane every chance he got.

The ironic thing about this — even though you are reluctant to use irony in the underdeveloped country of Arpaio — is that he made his career on targeting immigrants and undocumented aliens, even though so many of them had a far better sense for, and appreciation of, this country than he does.

Here’s how Arizona Federal Judge Susan Bolton — Arpaio claims she was biased against him — explained the criminal contempt decision against him a month ago:

“Not only did (Arpaio) abdicate responsibility, he announced to the world and to his subordinates that he was going to continue business as usual no matter who said otherwise.”

Arpaio insisted that the case against him was a witch hunt, which is just another way to understand how he became such a dream victim for the man who pardoned him. But then Arpaio has told everybody for years, is still telling them, that the real bad guys weren’t the Latinos being stopped because he, Joe Arpaio, had clearly decided they were illegals.

No, the real bad guys existed in the Justice Department of Barack Obama. And why not? If you didn’t believe Obama was even born in this country, how could you trust his lousy lawyers?

Through it all, Arpaio wasn’t just the sheriff of Maricopa County. He became the king of the racial profilers, operating above the law, and in broad daylight. They must be awfully proud in Arizona that he really did serve six terms. Not only does he get pardoned now, he gets cha-mpioned by all the predictable segments of the bullhorn media. Destiny brings them together, at the bottom-feeders ball.

“Law and order is not what Sheriff Arpaio is about,” The New York Times wrote last year. “Immigrant advocates, civil rights organizations and reporters in Arizona have spent years screaming into the wind about this, trying to alert the world that this celebrity peace officer does not, in fact, keep the peace. On the contrary: He abuses his power to mistreat inmates, to terrorize law-abiding Latinos, to harass and intimidate his critics and political adversaries.”

Arpaio is pardoned now before he faced jail time, though six months wouldn’t have been nearly enough. He is pardoned for a misdemeanor after a career that felt like a long and extended felony to everyone except the slow-thinking voters who kept him in office for as long as they did. It is a long held and sacred and rock-solid notion in this country that justice is supposed to be blind. Just not like this.