The American Himmler is running for the Senate

When former Arizona sheriff and pardoned criminal Joe Arpaio was in office, his jail led the nation in inmates who hanged themselves. Conditions were that bad.  Inmates, including pregnant women, were denied proper medical attention.  He once tried to frame an innocent man for plotting to murder him; the man walked free when his attorney was able to prove in open court that Arpaio himself had invented the whole story in an attempt to send a man he knew to be innocent to prison.

Arpaio was very fond of arresting people for the crime of driving- or walking, or just being someplace he didn't think they ought to be- while looking Hispanic. His discrimination against people of Hispanic origin and his habitual abuse of their civil rights was serious enough that he was convicted and sentenced to prison.

President Trump once again displayed his disdain for the Bill of Rights, the law, our traditional American values, and common decency by pardoning the jackass. The president was right about one thing: Arpaio doesn't belong in prison.

He belongs in a hospital for the criminally insane.

Arpaio's SWAT team once conducted a raid on the wrong house- and burned it to the ground. This would have been unconscionable no matter how vile the criminal who lived there.

But it was the wrong house. It wasn't the house that contained the weapons cache they were looking for, but their tear gas canisters started a fire. The innocent family who lived there were present,  and already outside the home! They lost their dog because Arpaio's storm troopers forced it back into the flaming house to be burned alive. Understandably, the poor homeless, dogless, and innocent people were upset. Arpaio's goons laughed at them.

Arpaio installed TV cameras in the women's rooms of his jail so that guards could watch female inmates use the bathroom. His lawyers argued that this was OK because a short partition blocked their view of the toilet itself.

More than once, inmates were beaten to death while Arpaio's guards stood by and watched. His jail (which at one point included tents set up outside to house inmates) has been described as a "concentration camp." A more or less comprehensive account of the antics of this appalling excuse for a human being can be found here.

And last August 25, the President of the United States tweeted, "I am pleased to inform you that I have just granted a full Pardon (sic) to 85 year old  (sic) American patriot Sheriff Joe Arpaio. He kept Arizona safe!" That should have been a tipoff to any Trump supporter sufficiently clueless not to "get it" where Trump is concerned. But of course, by definition, Trump supporters are impervious to reality.

Today, Joe Arpaio- a man who is in every conceivable way the antithesis of everything America has ever stood for and of decency itself- announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination to succeed Sen. Jeff Flake, a man whose shoes Arpaio is not worthy to have walk on his face.  No sooner do we get rid of Roy Moore than we have to face the sad prospect of the American Heinrich Himmler in the U.S. Senate.

And no, that is not an exaggeration. Joe Arpaio has countenanced murder.

Once again, the Alt-Right has thrown up a disgusting candidate so bad that even a liberal Democrat would be preferable. The people of Alabama were decent enough to reject Roy Moore, even though the man who beat him, Doug Jones, is no bargain. I am confident that the people of Arizona are decent enough to reject Joe Arpaio, who if anything is even worse.