If you're dumb enough to fork over cash to a scalawag like Sheriff Joe Arpaio, you're dumb enough to buy any line of bull the most-sued sheriff in the country wants to sell you.
Like the malarkey that the recent U.S. Department of Justice report on Arpaio's racial-profiling ways is "unsubstantiated" and ginned up for purely politically purposes.
Such is the hogwash Arpaio's well-paid hacks recently sent out via e-mail on behalf of "Re-Elect Joe Arpaio 2012," which had around $2.8 million on hand as of the end of 2010.
(Arpaio claims he has $6 million in the bank, but we won't know for certain how much dough he actually has till his campaign submits its next finance report, due by month's end.)
And I quote:
"Just last month the Obama Justice Department issued a scathing, but unsubstantiated report about my office and our efforts to combat illegal immigration.
"They accuse me of using `racial profiling' tactics during our course of investigating those who are in this country illegally. Yet, they offer no evidence to support their claims."
"No evidence"? On the contrary, the proof that Arpaio's boys in beige racially-profile brown folk is overwhelming.
If you need it spelled out for you, just read Village Voice Executive Editor Michael Lacey's cover story this week, "Coddling Joe," where he rightly points out that racial profiling is a felony, and the MCSO is guilty as sin.
Or you could peruse my recent commentary "Arpaio Corruption," where I detail some of the more grotesque examples of racial profiling mentioned in the DOJ's report.
Furthermore, it's a vile falsehood that the MCSO has merely racial-profiled "those who are in this country illegally."
Ordinary citizens and legal permanent residents such as Julian and Julio Mora and Fili Gaucin and his son, have been pulled into Arpaio's immigration raids and dragnets.
This, because they speak Spanish (or English with an accent), have brown skin, or wear a Tejano hat, for cryin' out loud.
But, sadly, the sheriff's target audience agrees with the prejudiced premise that all Latinos are illegal until proven otherwise.
That this asinine assumption, when adopted by law enforcement, happens to be illegal doesn't seem to bother the so-called "law and order" crowd.
Interestingly, the sheriff appears overly concerned that the DOJ report came when it did. This becomes the fuel for a lame cry of conspiracy.
Naturally, he overlooks the fact that the report also came during the same week that MCSO thugs brutalized and Tased Army vet Marty Atencio till the man was brain dead.
And he ignores the inconvenient truth that the DOJ report dropped about a week before the federal judge in the Melendres civil rights lawsuit opened the door for all Hispanics stopped by the MCSO since 2007 to join the legal action.
Arpaio's brazen defiance of the law, his agency's abuse of prisoners in its charge, and the MCSO's ethnic animus toward Hispanics, all have economic consequences for the citizens of Maricopa County beyond the pain and suffering of the victims involved.
But many of the bigots feeding Arpaio's greed don't even dwell here, where his nefarious actions affect people directly.
Which explains why his postscript addresses those who "do not live in Maricopa County, Arizona."
Just as disgraced ex-state Senate President Russell Pearce once relied largely on outside money for support, so too Arpaio survives, in no small part, from a flow of cash emanating from beyond this county's borders.
