On this day in both 2014, and in 2015, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted its first two profiles of Arizona Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, who is currently making another inexplicable attempt at running for the U.S. House of Representatives for Arizona’s 1st Congressional District. Unbelievably, he’s taking another crack at it after his aspirations to head to Washington, D.C. back in 2012 were cut short during the GOP Primary when the anti-immigrant sheriff was outed as gay by an ex-lover (pictured above) who also happened to be an illegal immigrant who Babeu tried to intimidate into keeping their love affair clandestine by threatening to deport him if he went to the media. And that’s not even the ONLY scandal Babeu’s got in his history. Remember when anti-immigrant candidate Adam Kwasman was running for Congress in 2014, and turned up to yell at a bus full of children (and it wasn’t even the bus filled with migrant children)? Sheriff Paul Babeu’s the guy who tipped Kwasman and a mob of xenophobes off to show up to throw rocks and scream at a bunch of kids. And yet, there’s more… Babeu was once a headmaster at the DeSisto School, a boarding school, from 1999-2001. While he was there, the school was repeatedly investigated for child abuse cases including forced strip searches and forcing the kids into group showers, and per Babeu’s own sister Lucy, Paul once took a 17-year old student home to be his live-in boyfriend.
And yet, Paul Babeu decided to run for office AGAIN here in 2016 in Arizona’s 1st District, thinking he could steal a seat in Congress that Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick was leaving open to go and challenge Sen. John McCain for his U.S. Senate seat, and Babeu won a six-candidate primary with 30% of the vote. which has a lot to do with the fact that there were other big names in the field like Wendy Rogers (in the CSGOPOTD queue), Ken Bennett (also in our queue), and Gary Kiehne (who we already profiled),
Well, Paul Babeu’s past has not gone away, thanks in part to his disgruntled sister Lucy, who actually shared a home movie from Christmas of 1999, where Babeu proudly boasts of the abusive brand of disclipline he used on the troubled youths in his care, including facing them into corners for days or weeks at a time, justifying it because the kids were, in his mind, “bonkers”.
Babeu responded to the video by denying any of the abuse ever happened, to an extent that Arizona’s ABCNews15 called him out for contradicting a 1700 page report that confirmed that it most certainly did. And, just in time for it to be considered an October surprise, one of the youths in Babeu’s care back in 2001 came forward to discuss her time at DeSisto School. Hilary Friedman now aged 31, was at the boarding school to be treated for the dread offense of having an eating disorder, and came forward to say that not only did the abuse occur, but Paul Babeu absolutely knew about it. Babeu participated in votes by the executive board to call for the extreme discipline being used on the children at DeSisto. The home video shows he knew about some of the harsh techniques. And court affidavits all confirm her statements, and show Babeu is lying his ass off.
So, while Ann Kirkpatrick running for Senate might have given the GOP a chance to flip Arizona’s 1st Congressional House seat blue, they’re running a disaster of a candidate like Paul Babeu against Tom O'Halleran, a former state legislator who has shifted away from the GOP the past several years, going from a Republican to an Independent, to a Democrat (the Tea Party moved his party away from him, it seems). Polls in Arizona’s first have O'Halleran up by 7 points over Babeu, That’s pretty impressive considering Arizona’s 1st District has a +4 Republican lean in the Cook Partisan Voting Index, and a sure sign that the public is aware of what an utter scumbag the GOP have put on the ticket there this year.