During last year's midterm election campaign, one of Senator McCain's videos showed him walking along the border near Nogales, Arizona, with Sheriff Paul Babeu, a Massachusetts transplant who quickly became a media darling on Fox and other rightwing media outlets during Arizona's immigration debate. Articulate, handsome, and less acerbic than his hero Joe Arpaio, the bullet-headed Sheriff could be seen or heard almost 24/7 railing against the Obama administration's border policy, and of course speaking out in support of SB 1070.
In the Senator's 30-second campaign video, intended to counter the Tea Party's primary challenge from crazyman JD Hayworth, Babeu and McCain complain about crime and other problems created by undocumented immigrants, while blasting Obama for not doing enough to "secure our borders." The video ends with McCain's quip, "Complete the dang fence."
It didn't matter that just a few years ago John McCain said longer and higher fences are not the answer to our immigration problems -- what we need is reform.
It didn't matter that the crime McCain and Babeu complain about in the ad had decreased considerably according to FBI statistics -- along the border specifically and in Arizona in general.
It didn't matter that Babeau was Sheriff of Pinal County, nearly 100 miles north of the border, while Tony Estrada, the actual Sheriff of Santa Cruz County, where Nogales sits, did not support SB 1070 or more fences.
It didn't matter that the Obama administration had allocated more money and border patrols to the region than Bush or any previous president. The truth, in other words, did not matter.
What did matter was votes, and the way to earn them was to continue to scare the shit out of white people, with Governor Brewer blathering about "headless bodies" in the desert (not one was ever found), with constant stories about drug runners and rapes and killings (such as rancher Robert Krentz's murder), with Senator Russell Pearce whining about how immigration costs Arizonans billions of dollars annually (bull puckey) -- all of it, numbers and stories yanked out of their ass.
Sheriff Babeu hit the big time last spring courtesy of another ass-yanked fable. His Deputy, Louie Puroll, was shot in the desert, supposedly in an exchange with Mexican drug runners. The event occurred one week after Governor Brewer signed the "papers please" bill in April, so the state was still in the grips of protests and debate. The media, whose coverage was nonstop SB 1070 at the time, ate up the Deputy's story, as you can see in the way the Fox station breathlessly reported the shooting that evening:
The story became another reason why SB 1070 was necessary, and Babeu went on the media circuit praising his Deputy, even appearing on nutjob shows like Alex Jones, where Babeu essentially accuses Obama of treason -- not to mention the white supremacist show "Political Cesspool" in Tennessee (h/t Tim in AZ). Within a few days, however, skeptics started to point out inconsistencies between the Deputy's story and the facts on the ground. Like: What happened to the drug runners and their stash in the middle of the desert? Police helicopters were on the scene within minutes and there was no trace of immigrants, and absolutely nowhere for them to hide (and no, the helicopters were not fired on, as the newscaster says). Forensic evidence, too, didn't dovetail with Puroll's story. Nonetheless, Sheriff Babeu continued to use the ambush as justification for SB 1070, a higher wall, and stricter immigration enforcement.
What Fox didn't report was the news last week that Deputy Puroll's story was bogus and he was fired. What Sheriff Babeu hasn't done is apologize for using this lie -- and the many other fibs he's told during the immigration debate -- to justify more assaults on our civil liberties, and to bolster his eventual run for Congress.
And for that, we learned today, for looking Arizonans straight in the camera and telling them a pile of doo-doo, Sheriff Paul Babeau received a national award: "Sheriff of the Year" from the National Sheriffs' Association "for his strong stance against illegal immigration."
What? Arpaio wasn't available?