Profiles in Courage

In the midst of all of this rhetoric about the ills affecting the USA a shining star continues to beam brightly with the penetrating rays of duty, integrity and mission orientation.

Sheriff Joe Arpiao of Maricopa County, Arizona continues to redeem himself as a member of that ever shrinking club; “Patriotic Americans with common sense.”

If you don’t know whom Sheriff Arpiao well you have been missing some of the best press in the nation over the last decade. The good sheriff made a significant national name for himself when he started doing things like feeding bologna sandwiches to his inmates and issuing them pink underwear. When the inmates started to complain Sheriff Arpiao was ready for them; he’d had the new diet reviewed by a nutritionist to insure that it complied with requirements. Regarding the complaints about the underwear he offered, “If you don’t like in jail, don’t come back.”

In these, and many other efforts, he has demonstrated that he is a true servant of the people by demanding and maintaining the standards. The metrosexual (just what in the Sam hill is that anyway?!?) morons on the left and right coasts who suggest that Maricopa County is in “fly-over” country and irrelevant to the ‘greater’ dialogue would do very well to retain Sheriff Arpiao as the head of Homeland Security.

The latest triumph of reason over stupidity on the part of Arpiao is his recruitment of some 3000 (yes, that is thousand) members of the county posse. You see the sheriff doesn’t have the luxury of delving into hypotheticals couched in “position papers” generated in absurdly useless places like the Ivy League Schools of Government and Public Policy. No, Sheriff Arpiao has a major situation on his hands RIGHT NOW. His county is right at the front of the land invasion of the United States. Indeed, he probably understands the word “insurgency” as well or better than any other American.

As the chief lawman of the county he is sworn to protect and enforce the law. He doesn’t have time for muddle some appeals to pity like “We are just here to work, we are not breaking the law.” (A quote that I recently heard spewed from some nameless ‘Reconquista’ apologist). The fact is, and the sheriff understands this, that people who come over our borders illegally are either breaking the law or frankly intent on a violent act (invasion) of the United States. There is one exception and that is those individuals who are fleeing regimes that are frankly threatening to their lives, we call those people refugees and we call the process of them coming here ‘seeking asylum’. The problem is that Mexico is not one of those countries that we recognize as a nation from which people can come seeking asylum. Even if we did, the popular vote, as expressed above, by the ‘reconquistadors’ is that they are here not to escape persecution on the part of El Presidente; they are here for work, and that is not breaking the law.

Most sheriffs don’t have a lot of money to hire loads of deputies. Heaven knows that the INS with a federal budget cannot seem to do its job of stopping the hoards, what is a rural sheriff to do? When sheriffs can’t hire lots of people they can, in times of need, appoint private citizens as members of their “posse” to address situations when they simply need manpower to go after criminals. Understand, regardless of what you want to believe, people who enter the USA illegally, looking for work or not, are criminals. That’s truth. Have all your rallies or whatever, the bottom line is that every one of them is a criminal, PERIOD.

Sheriff Arpiao is going after criminals. Frankly a lot of them are more than just felons for entering the USA. A lot of them are criminals from Mexico, drug addicts, rapists and whatever else El Presidente can toss over the border. Arpiao is going after criminals just as his mandate tells him too. It would be really cool if the officials in Homeland Security would ruck up, arm up and head south. Unfortunately in the ‘enlightened’ halls of the pseudo-intelligencia of the East, actually doing your job and defending the borders of the USA causes such internal cognitive dissonance that… …”Mommy my head hurts please make it stop…”…

So we have to leave it to a sheriff in a relatively obscure little county down in the deep Southwestern United States to show us how we should do our duty. God Bless Sheriff Arpiao.

Let me point out a very simple fact. Our government has shut down on a couple of occasions. In fact, it shuts down every week. 2/7ths of the time, over a quarter of the time, our government is gone, out of touch, incommunicado. Every weekend, hundreds of thousands of local, state and federal employees head for the barn and yet life goes on. The 2% milk is still in the cooler at the local grocery and the ATMs still spit out cash if you put your pin in correctly. This is reality.

People have been talking and whining and crying that if we toss all of the illegals back over the border and enforce the laws, life as we know it and cheap tomatoes will cease to exist. That is complete balderdash. ROT. It is a philosophy propagated by individuals who either lack the balls to actually do something for their country and make a selfless decision or they are people who have a serious vested interest (read financial) in the continued use of illegal labor.

The United States of America is only going to fail if we destroy it from within. If we forget our laws and the importance of enforcing them, THEN and only then will we see the beginning of our end. It takes courage to say ‘no’, I know because as a parent I do it every day with the two little people I love more than anything in the world. I don’t cave into pressure because what they want to do isn’t hurting anyone and in fact it would make them “really happy”. If it is something that in the long term will not help them grow into healthy and moral adults, the answer is no. I cannot tell you how many useless adults I know that started out as indulged children whose parents tried to replace love and responsibility with indulgence. The result is not pretty and it certainly is not the essence of the greatest of American Heroes.

Neglecting out borders and giving a pass to those who are already here against the law, no matter how ‘happy’ it may be making them, is the equivalent of not being a responsible parent and caretaker of your blessings.

We can all give a big thanks to Sheriff Arpiao for having the strength to say “NO”.