What the Hell Is Wrong With Arizona?

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire Magazine

04 May 12

he other night in a debate, Nebraska attorney general Jon Bruning, who may very well be the next U.S. senator, talking about the subject of immigration, told the state how proud he was to have been endorsed by "Sheriff" Joe Arpaio, the authoritarian loon from Arizona. The other day, a defrocked white-supremacist state senator from Arizona named Russell Pearce testified before Congress in support of the authoritarian anti-immigration law he'd helped draft that may very well be upheld by the United States Supreme Court. One of the staunch allies of both Arpaio and Pearce in their fight against the brown people was an out-and-out Nazi named J.T. Ready - although, eventually, even Pearce distanced himself from Ready and the armband crowd.

Yesterday, J. T. Ready went into a home in Gilbert, Arizona and blew-away four people and then himself, which was definitely doing things in the wrong order. Guilt-by-association, hell. Local politicians in Arizona have been playing footsie with murderous hoodlums for going on a decade now; the Phoenix New Times has done some very brave reporting on this, and my buddy Dave Niewert has been tracking the nexus of what he calls "the eliminationists" and mainstream politicians out west for over 20 years. Quite simply, responsible authorities in Arizona should have put a stop to this years ago. Russell Pearce testified before Congress. There are levels of madness out there in the land that we can't possibly fathom.