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| TRUMP: President of the xenophobes? |
Offensive? Yes. Immoral? Of course!
BUT IT IS totally in character when one considers
Trump would not want to be a guy who would want one-time Maricopa, Ariz.,
Sheriff Joe Arpaio punished. He probably thinks it wrong that a law enforcement
officer would wind up having to do jail time – even the miniscule sentence that
Arpaio was facing.
So the president went ahead and used his power of clemency to undermine the
federal prosecutors who got a criminal conviction earlier this year against
Arpaio, and were seeking his sentencing come October – when he was likely to
face up to six months in jail (probably at a minimum-security facility where
extra effort would be made to ensure he was not attacked by other inmates).
Arpaio
will never have to face that moment of standing before a judge and hearing that
he’s now just another convict. He’ll never have to sit in a cell as punishment
for his crimes.
Which,
in all honesty, was a moment that a segment of our society was eager to see
happen. I suspect that Trump feeling nothing but spite for those people most
repulsed by Arpaio were his strongest motivations for issuing a pardon.
FOR ALL I know, Trump may not even truly comprehend what it was that Arpaio did
wrong that brought his time as the Phoenix area’s sheriff before prosecutors to
begin with.
Arpaio
is the guy who likes to think he’s the rough-and-tough lawman who cracks down
on criminals. He’s the guy who ran his jail under overly harsh conditions, and
he was the one whose deputies often conducted raids of Latino neighborhoods in
search of people without valid visas to live in this country.
I’m
sure some nitwits will claim that Arpaio is merely the guy who made jail inmates
wear pink underwear. But he was the guy who was calling for harassment of
people with no real probable cause. Unless you believe being Latino is
criminal?
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| ARPAIO: Won't do the time for his crime |
What
ultimately got Arpaio into legal trouble is when the courts ruled that the
sheriff’s tactics exceeded the limits of the law, yet he persisted with them
anyway.
BECAUSE
HARASSING PEOPLE whose ethnic origins lie within Mexico was more important to
him than actually following the letter of the law to which he was supposed to
uphold. Particularly ironic considering that Arizona’s origins lie within
Mexico and the Spanish colonies, and one could argue that the people Arpaio was
protecting were the real “foreigners.”
But
with Trump’s desire to rely solely on the xenophobes with particularly
irrational hang-ups with regards to Mexico, it’s no wonder he’d seek to protect
Arpaio.
Particularly
since his campaign promise of erecting a wall along the U.S./Mexico border is
one likely never to come true, he has to be able to claim to have done
something that the nativist element of our society. Does protecting Arpaio from
having to do laundry detail while serving time in a minimum-security prison
facility make up for it? I’m sure Trump is hoping so.
What
is going to make this particular pardon stand it is that Arpaio really didn’t
fit the usual guidelines for clemency. Usually, someone has to wait a few years
before they can even apply for a pardon.
THE
POINT BEING that the person in question must actually serve the time. The point
of a pardon being to ease the level of shame they must go through during the
rest of their lives because of their actions that put them in prison for a
stint.
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| Wonder what he thinks of pink shorts now? |
In
that regard, Arpaio is likely to go through his life as an unapologetic ass who
will “get away” with his actions that brought great harm to people. He’ll
probably die thinking he did nothing wrong – even though the Supreme Court of
the United States itself has said that accepting a pardon IS an admission of
guilt.
But
karma has a way of biting back; someone is going to have to suffer for this act
of clemency being issued.
Which
could wind up being Trump himself, since he has now besmirched his legacy in
ways that he likely will never fully appreciate as the xenophobic president, but which the Trump name will
have a hard time living down for generations to come.
-30-
EDITOR’S
NOTE: A poll last week by OH Predictive Insights said only 21 percent of
Arizona residents wanted the president to offer clemency to Joe Arpaio – who ceased
being sheriff last year after losing a re-election bid. It will be interesting
to see how big a plummet Trump takes in his own approval ratings; as he had
only 35 percent support in the Gallup Organization’s presidential approval poll
taken just before he issued his clemency Friday night – likely hoping people
would be focused on Hurricane Harvey’s devastation in Texas to pay any
attention to Arpaio.
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