The only part of the Wall Street Journal editors’ editorial on President Trump’s premature pardon for Joseph Arpaio with which I can agree wholeheartedly is the last sentence:
The Arpaio pardon is a depressing sign of our hyper-politicized times.
I think that outrage on all sides about it has been highly selective. I don’t think that Trump should have issued the pardon but I find the concerns expressed over it exaggerated and hypocritical. I look forward to the proposed legislation put forward by a presumed Democratic Congressional majority and submitted for a Democratic president’s signature to amend the Constitution to limit the president’s pardon power.
It was a political response to a political prosecution.
And, what about all of Obama’s dubious presidential pardons, involving far more violent men and deeds? What about the Mark Rich one, executed at the end of Clinton’s term? Dems turn a blind eye on their own party’s slimy actions, and become hysterical over anything they view as askew when R’s use their presidential pens.
The hypocrisy is not lost on the masses, IMO.
Definitely a political prosecution. Sessions let his biased political views cloud his judgement in prosecuting Arpaio.
jan- No one likes it when the other team pardons, but both sides generally run the pardons through Justice and only grant pardons after some time served and an acknowledgment of remorse and responsibility. Does not describe Arpaio.
“Unlike Arpaio, the men and women to whom Obama showed mercy all had served significant time in federal prisons before they sought clemency. (Manning, for instance, ultimately served seven years.) Unlike Arpaio, each accepted responsibility for the crime or crimes that had put them behind bars. Unlike Arpaio, each went through a laborious vetting process by the Justice Department to ensure that the relief that ultimately was granted could be justified.
In the case of Arpaio, by contrast, the Justice Department meekly accepted Trump’s pardon late Friday without so much as a peep from the attorney general (an attorney general who railed against Obama’s clemency orders). There is no reason to think there was a thorough review of Arpaio’s situation at the White House counsel’s office. Is the attorney general ever going to explain how pardoning a peace officer who broke the law fits into the Justice Department’s push to restore “integrity†to the rule of law?
There is one more difference between what Trump has just done and what Obama did. Obama granted mercy not just to high-profile inmate Manning, but to ordinary men and women who committed ordinary crimes. Trump granted mercy to a man who swore an oath and then put himself above the law in the most fundamental way possible—by refusing to enforce the law as the courts had interpreted it. In Trump’s world that is celebrated as “public service.†In the real world we call that criminal contempt.”
Steve
Here’s the world Arpaio ran:
And in the ultimate display of cruelty, a SWAT team member drove a dog trying to flee the home back into the inferno, where it met an agonizing death.
Deputies then reportedly laughed as the dog’s owners came unglued as it perished in the blaze.
“I was crying hysterically,” Andrea Barker, one of the dog’s owners, tells me. “I was so upset. They [deputies] were laughing at me.”
Making fun of the 10-month-old pit bull puppy’s death wasn’t enough.
Arpaio’s goons then left the dog’s body to rot in the ashes for the next five days of 105-degree temperatures. A pall of death hung over the neighborhood. It was a putrid reminder of Arpaio’s reckless use of force and callous disregard for the public’s welfare. Not to mention the heinous treatment toward the terrified dog.
And what did Arpaio’s crack SWAT team net from the raid that left a needless trail of death and destruction?
MCSO stormed the house believing there was a cache of stolen automatic weapons and armor-piercing ammunition. But MCSO got bushwhacked. Instead of finding weapons of mass destruction, they discovered an antique shotgun and a 9 mm pistol that appear to be legal weapons.
There was no sign of the cop-killer bullets. Perhaps they are buried somewhere out in the desert, with Saddam’s plutonium.
Given the overwhelming display of force deployed by Arpaio’s deputies, one would have expected the arrest of a mass murderer.
Instead, the crack SWAT boys nabbed 26-year-old Eric Kush. Let me tell you, Kush is really a bad, bad guy.
He was wanted on a misdemeanor warrant for failing to appear in Tempe Municipal Court on a couple of traffic citations.
Thank God he’s off the street. Well, not quite. He posted his $1,000 bond on the misdemeanor warrant and was quickly released from jail.
Arpaio’s Ahwatukee assault should have drawn banner headlines in the daily newspapers. But the Arizona Republic, where Arpaio’s son-in-law, Phil Boas, serves as deputy editor of the editorial pages, buried the story in a community section. The East Valley Tribune ignored it entirely.
He’s a piece of human shit who is into torture and cruelty. Read about him–he’s going to burn in hell. Trump can’t be impeached for it, but who cares–if you find yourself conflicted about this problem you have serious fucking problems.
Looking forward to the defenses of Trump supporters into this specimen because killing puppies pisses off the libtards. Ain’t nothing completely abnormal about that!