Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio is not just extremist, vindictive, and corrupt—he’s a full-fledged, flamin
g, deny-the-facts birther as well.
We wrote, last September, about how he assigned a five-member “Cold Case Posse” to investigate the authenticity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Keep in mind, this was months after the President released his long form birth certificate, and politicians from Eric Cantor to John Boehner to Newt Gingrich were forced to admit the thing was real.
Yesterday, Arpaio announced the conclusion his citizens’ commission had come to: that the Obama birth certificate is a suspected forgery and that the Sheriff cannot in good faith say it is authentic.
The Sheriff says he is not accusing Obama of any crimes, but “there remain a lot of questions which beg for answers.”
And there you have it. Instead of, say, changing his department’s enforcement practices so that he won’t get sued or investigated by the federal government so often, Arpaio is choosing to see what he wants to see and beating this dead horse just for kicks.
The thing that needs further investigating here isn’t Barack Obama’s birth certificate. It’s Sheriff Arpaio’s long, long history of abuse and corruption, and it’s his supporters’ baffling rationale in continuing to elect such a man.
