Arizona's biggest clown
(Gage Skidmore/
Flickr)
On Thursday Sheriff Joe Arpaio
held a press conference to announce the "results" of his investigation into whether the Democratic current President of the United States was really born in America at all or whether it was a decades-spanning plot to do (something) because (something) and because, obviously, the first non-lily-white American president cannot
possibly be legitimate on the merits, especially in those nooks of America that, like Arizona, have recently rededicated themselves towards race-based paranoias of all sorts.
As near as can be determined, the primary conclusion of Sheriff Joe and his Insane Clown Posse is that scanned documents are scanned. Rather than Arpaio actually having any investigation at all, he simply outsourced it to a passel of conspiracy cranks from World Net Daily and the like who had already reached their "conclusions" years ago, put the Sheriff Joe name on the top of the thing, and called it done. This is the kind of dedicated, not-at-all-asinine work we have come to expect from America's worst-run sheriff department. The only non-asinine thing about any of it was, as Arpaio so earnestly assured us all, that the hard work of repackaging old conspiracy theories was financed from gullible donors. He did not siphon public money in order to "investigate" anything.
That was the story on Thursday, anyway. Now? Maybe not so much:
Arpaio told radio talk show host Mike Broomhead on station KFYI that the [purported results of his insane hunt for zebras by an outsourced group of zebra-hunters] "takes it into a different level."
"I'll have to decide how to go with this and get some more help from our detectives that we should pursue," Arpaio said. "When you get information about a criminal violation, I think it's incumbent on somebody to look at it and do something about it."
Two things jump out, obviously. One, that he is so taken with this 'scanned documents are scanned' theory he is now contemplating having his sheriff department spend actual money following up on it. Two: he says "get some
more help"? More? Is this jackass saying he
had previous help from his own paid sheriff's staff, despite denying it mere hours beforehand?
While I am sorely tempted to donate money to Sheriff Joe to have him "investigate" other things (and really, Sheriff Joe Investigates sounds like a damn fine Fox News program—I can hear the theremin-heavy opening credits already), I would be damn peeved to hear that this nut has or might use taxpayer-funded employees to pursue his little pet theories. Still, I expect now that Sheriff Joe will want to get cracking on investigations as to whether we ever really landed on the moon, whether the Loch Ness Monster really exists, and what really happened on 9/11. I am sure he will be able to find volunteer "investigators" on the internet for each of those things; all that is required is that he plaster his name up there at the top. This is a man that raids suspected cock-fighting operations in an armored tank with his name prominently displayed on the side, and with Steven Seagal in tow for good measure, so self-promotion would seem to be this conspiracy crank's core skill.