On this date in 2014, 2015, as well as 2016, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published profiles of Arizona Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, who every few years gets bold enough to try and run for Congress in Arizona’s 1st Congressional District. His Back in 2012, his aspirations for higher office 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 Babeu’s sister even shared a home movie from Christmas of 1999 with the media, where Babeu proudly boasts of the abusive brand of discipline 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”.
And so, Paul Babeu lost his bid for Congress, getting only 43% of the vote against Democrat Tom O’Halleran in the 2016 elections. He has thus far not been mentioned for any office in 2018, and even the Arizona GOP is probably relieved by that. He has yet to reveal what he plans on doing now that he is out of a job, currently.