Last week, Sheriff Joe Arpaio was in the media spotlight for holding a series of one-on-one meetings with leading GOP presidential candidates, including Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann. This week, for an encore, the notoriously anti-immigration Sheriff from Maricopa County has established himself as a birther. Yes, his new obsession is President Obama’s birth certificate.
We learned about Sheriff Joe’s latest antics from Think Progress:
The lawman is also a birther, it seems, and one willing to use official resources to pursue the bogus conspiracy theory. As birther website WorldNetDaily gleefully reported:
Arizona’s Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio told WND [World Net Daily] he has assigned a five-member “Cold Case Posse” to investigate the authenticity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
The decision, he says, is simply a matter of doing his duty.
“This investigation does not involve politics,” Arpaio told WND.
Arpaio’s investigation comes in response to a complaint filed by the Surprise, Arizona Tea Party, which alleges that Obama may be using a forged birth certificate. “I believe Sheriff Arpaio and his Cold Case Posse will be thorough and complete in their investigation,” a spokesman for the group said.
The Cold Case Posse is an officially-sponsored all-volunteer group of people with skills and backgrounds that make them qualified to investigate cases. The group has been inactive in recent months due to “budgetary limitations within the Maricopa County Sheriff’s office,” but apparently a wild goose chase looking into the veracity of the president’s birth certificate is an appropriate use of funds.
Sheriff Arpaio. Obama’s Birth Certificate. Tea Party activitsts. World Net Daily. Sure, that’s just like Sheriff Joe. No politics involved. Right.
