Rick Perry will have a special guest during his stump speeches in New Hampshire this week: Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. ABC News reports that Arpaio, most famous for supporting Arizona's draconian immigration law, will officially endorse Texas governor Perry in the very near future.
Perry and his Republican rivals have been salivating over a potential Arpaio endorsement for months, largely because his approval can help them woo anti-immigrant Republicans. But Arpaio's more than just a foe of illegal immigrants: he's down-right bigoted.
In a 2007 CNN interview, while discussing his heavy-handed immigration policies, the Maricopa County sheriff said it's an honor to be compared to the Ku Klux Klan. And last year the Justice Department sued Arpaio for documents pertaining to racial profiling of Hispanics in the Copper State.
More than just an anti-immigrant extremist, Arpaio also exhibits sadistic cruelty in his penal reforms: he enjoys making inmates wear pink underwear — because pink is girly and gay and therefore humiliating — has constructed tent cities to house prisoners and illegal immigrants despite the fact that summers in Arizona are inhumanly hot, and he used public prison funds to pay staffers rather than take care of inmates.
Nor does Arpaio have any sympathy or remorse for his own office's misconduct. Andrew Cohen at The Atlantic provides an excellent example:
Earlier this month, Maricopa County paid a $1 million settlement to the family of a man who died in Arpaio's custody. Predictably, Sheriff Joe downplayed the death and blamed someone else for the deal. "It was settled due to the nature of doing business," Arpaio told The Arizona Republic. "That (settlement) wasn't up to us, that was the county that decided to settle it. We have nothing to do with this…"
But of course Perry's willing to look past all of this because he took a beating in the conservative press for saying during a debate this year that anti-immigrant activists are "heartless" and now needs show he's as tough as Sheriff Joe, a man who embodies the GOP's most extreme immigration policy: civil rights and human decency are acceptable collateral damage when dealing with scary "criminal" Mexicans.
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