Former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is a real-life villain, and politicians who claim to champion “law and order” do the exact opposite when they shower praise on this particularly cruel and lawless tyrant.

Yet, praise is exactly what Vice President Mike Pence had for the former sheriff this week at an event they both attended in Tempe, Ariz. President Trump’s second-in-command called Arpaio a “great friend of this president” and a “tireless champion of strong borders and the rule of law.”

The vice president even said he was “honored” to be in the same room as Arpaio.

Pence is a great fool.

Arpaio is no champion of the rule of law. There’s certainly nothing honorable about him. Arpaio is an enemy of liberty, the law, and basic human decency. Pence should feel a deep, burning shame for claiming otherwise.

President Trump, the self-styled defender of “law and order,” may have pardoned the former sheriff for criminal contempt of court, showing the commander in chief is not above the sort of swampy back-scratching he promised to excise from the nation’s capital, but that won’t wash away the stench of Arpaio’s other offenses, of which there are many.

Consider this brief list:



I’m not sure who Pence was talking about at that event in Tempe, because the Arpaio who held office in Maricopa County all those years is certainly no “tireless champion” of “the rule of law.” The real Arpaio is a vicious scofflaw whose decadeslong tenure as a so-called lawman should be defined by his relentless pursuit of personal gain, which was done at the the expense of those he was charged to serve and protect.