Jan Brewer won the Arizona gubernatorial race in 2010, not because she was the most qualified, but because on April 23 of that year she signed SB 1070, the “papers please” law, in the wake of the 2009-2010 Year of Hate. Until she locked arms with the racist Arpaio-Pearce wing of the Arizona GOP, a Brewer victory was not certain. In fact, a year before the election she trailed former Phoenix Mayor and Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard by 10 points or more.
But as the tea party pustule festered nationwide, Brewer tied her political future to the disruptive bigotry playing out on our TV screens. Almost nightly we watched far-right, raging voters scream at, shout down and threaten Democratic candidates at town halls. These astroturf protests, orchestrated by a number of conservative causes, stoked the embers of hate that resulted in Donald Trump. And now they’re trying to stop the monster they created. Screw ‘em.
In Arizona that kind of organized hate is old hat. With authoritarian bigots like Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Sen. Russell Pearce in charge, and County Attorney Andrew Thomas sanctioning their racism, the 2009-10 chaos was cranked up to 11 here, and papers-please-embracing Jan Brewer rode that wave of vitriol right into the governor’s office, defeating Terry by 12 points, even after her disastrous PBS debate where 16 seconds of deer-meet-headlights went viral.
Kowtowing to the crazy that elected her, Gov. Brewer continued to spew hateful BS about immigrants during her term. She lied about headless bodies in the desert, and she cozied up to extremist bozos in the militia movement, even suggesting that the state give dangerous white supremacist nutballs like J.T. Ready a badge and authority to continue his hatin’ on Mexicans. (Ready eventually murdered a family of four before offing himself.)
More recently Brewer defended Trump’s remarks about Mexico sending its rapists, drug dealers and killers: “I believe that Mr. Trump is kind of telling it like it really, truly is,” she said. So it’s no surprise that Brewer has endorsed Donald “The Hispanics Love Me” Trump for the Republican nomination:
Former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer on Saturday endorsed frontrunner Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, saying the celebrity billionaire provides the best chance to secure the nation’s borders.
Right, because border walls are the most important issue facing America today, especially since immigration is down, deportations are up, and in some states like Arizona there’s actually a net out-flow of immigrants. Local and national media have run stories about businesses that are unable to fill jobs because so many immigrant laborers have left the state.
Current Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, who not only continued but expanded most of Brewer’s mean-spirited, corporatist, bigoted policies, hasn’t endorsed Trump yet, but he said this week he will support the GOP front-runner if he is the party’s nominee:
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said Wednesday he'll back the Republican nominee for president — even if it is Donald Trump...
Ducey said that what's important to him is defeating Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, the Democrats in the race.
With backing from the Arizona Republican Party, which is so far off the rails they censured Sen. John McCain for his “liberal record,” the Brewer and Ducey administrations, directed by ALEC and backed by the Koch network, have dismantled health care, drastically cut welfare, shuttered most rural women’s clinics, gutted education, enacted racist immigration policies, embraced the private prison industry, attacked LGBT rights, outlawed responsible gun and environmental measures, and passed tax policies that are favorable to corporations and no one else.
A Clinton or Sanders presidency would threaten the asshats who’ve been doing this shit—the state’s fundamentalist, business-fellating leadership that’s an enemy to just about everything that makes for a healthy state—economically, environmentally, socially. A Democratic administration, along with a new Supreme Court seat, would at least create barriers to the GOP plans to enact even more racist, homophobic, corporate-friendly, women-hating, mean-spirited legislation, while Trump would applaud and nourish the hate, especially when it comes to immigrants, something Brewer is thankful for:
“This may be our last chance to ensure our children grow up in a country with borders, and with a government that protects its own people.”
Got that? You might not “grow up in a country with borders” because those lines on the map are just suggestions. And you might not have a “government that protects its own people” as well as the Bush administration did before 9/11. Has Brewer even been to the border recently? It’s a friggin’ military zone! How many more agents, walls, drones, surveillance balloons, cameras and outposts can Obama send? Seems like every other vehicle is a white and green truck. Obama more than doubled the number of agents since Bush, but, truth is, he could build a mile-high wall with an alligator-filled moat and Republicans would still whine that the President black Democrat is “not protecting America.”
Brewer wasn’t a nasty lady when she was a young Republican legislator in the ‘80s and ‘90s, a moderate official who ran on an education platform. But if you look up “Peter Principle Governor” in Webster’s, there’s her pic and bio—someone who hung around government her entire career until, as secretary of State, she fell into the governor’s chair when Gov. Napolitano resigned to head DHS in 2009. I saw Janet the week she was offered the job and offered my two cents, which was “Ack! Hairball! Please stay!” I was not alone. We knew the bill she had vetoed several times, the “papers please” clusterfuck, probably would be signed by a Republican.
True to form, when Jan Brewer had to campaign for the job in 2010, at first her party, which had moved so far to the right that Barry Goldwater would’ve been unwelcome, was less than enthusiastic, given Brewer’s more moderate record, and a few far-right loonies filed to oppose her in the GOP primary. As the ugly, racist, and downright stupid tea party BS played out daily leading up to the 2010 election, Brewer knew she had to swim in the putrid Arpaio scum to win the primary and beat Democrat Terry Goddard, and so in April 2010 she signed SB 1070 with great fanfare. She’s still treading water in that stinking scum—this week defending Trump’s KKK endorsement and today blasting Mitt Romney for his criticism of Trump.
Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick is running a great ad that links McCain to Trump, since Arizona’s senior senator has said he will support the GOP nominee regardless of who it is, even Trump, the chickenhawk piss ant who dismissed Sen. McCain for not being a “real” hero. It’s too bad Gov. Ducey isn’t up for re-election this year, so we can ask him if he’s measured Trump’s schlong—apparently an Oval Office requirement that Republican presidential candidate Donald J. “Small Hands” Trump deemed worthy and important enough to raise during tonight’s debate. I’m just waiting for him to grab his crotch and shout, “Hey, Ruby, I got yer ‘policies’ right here!”