The most virulently anti-illegal-immigration people I've known are my late grandfather (who was otherwise a fairly reasonable person but thought illegal immigrants were ruining the country), and my cousin (who thinks that he's going to be forced to learn Spanish). Both spent pretty much their whole lives in Maine, which is as far away from the
Mexican border as you can get in the continental US; I'm not sure either of them met an illegal immigrant in his life.
Meanwhile, I have three aunts living in Miami including a Democrat, a Democratic-leaning independent, and a Republican-leaning independent. At least two of them have plenty of complaints about the Cuban and Haitian population of the city, but they're all in the realm of "minor annoyances" (Cubans are noisy, Haitians build things without permits) and for none of them is controlling illegal immigration a major priority. So yeah, I'll buy what avi says. Familiarity breeds contempt and all that.
NoodleFox wrote:Hah, I fluctuate between both sides of pretty much anything these days, as I can never seem to find straight up journalism without having it spun a certain narrative (both left and right) - I already saw him as a terrible person before all of this, but I also read and saw things that would make me...question what I already knew...so yeah, faulty reasoning in BotD (benefit of the doubt). could also be me unconsciously trying to get my dietary supplement of salt as a troll, too?
Thing is, while the mainstream media gets a lot of things wrong when it comes to people they view as political opponents, the right-wing media is worse in that regard and the far-right media is a
lot worse.
Arpaio is a good example of this. The narrative in mainstream sources has been: look at what a horrible sheriff he was, look at how he's unrepentant, look at how this sets a precedent. The far-right narrative has been "he's an eighty-five-year-old public servant who was just doing his job and had the temerity to question Obama's birth certificate and immigration policies, for which he was railroaded by a liberal judge and denied his right to a jury trial."
The problem with the right-wing narrative is that every part of it which tries to excuse his actions or justify his pardon is at best a distraction and in most cases misleading or wrong.
- His age is irrelevant, considering that he hasn't been sentenced and would have gotten at most a slap on the wrist. This is the only part of the pro-Arpaio narrative which is not misleading or wrong. It's just utterly irrelevant.
- The fact that he's a public servant means he should be held to a higher standard, particularly WRT the law, which he should known.
- I've already talked about the collateral bar rule, which explains why he cannot say "I think I'm required to do this so I'm going to ignore this injunction." He also didn't do his job when it came to sex abuse, and in fact misappropriated $80 million for his pet projects and personal vacations.
- Despite the narrative of Obama persecuting political opponents, that's not something there's any evidence he actually did. However there's plenty of evidence that "Sheriff Joe" did that.
- The judge in question was a George W. Bush appointee.
- He had no right to a jury trial since his maximum sentence was less than six months.
I can explain to you, point-by-point, why the pro-Arpaio narrative is wrong. The only response I've seen his defenders raise to the mainstream narrative is "but Marc Rich! But Chelsea Manning!" which is both a tu quoque fallacy and a bad analogy since Manning was not a campaign supporter of Obama, neither one of them abused the civil rights of their fellow Americans under color of office, and both had already been sentenced, with Manning even serving some time.
If you have a better argument in his defense I'd like to hear it, but so far I'd the fact that it's trivially easy for me to rebut most the claims Arpaio's defenders have made (the jury trial one was a bit more effort) and not so for his supporters with regards to the criticisms leveled against him should demonstrate clearly why Breitbart and the MSM are not two sides of the same coin.
NoodleFox wrote:Doesn't this set a legal precedent though, pardoning someone before they were sentenced?
Not a legal precedent: as Absentia noted he already had the right to do this. But it does set a precedent nonetheless. You know how Trump's defenders are shouting "but Marc Rich!"? Despite this being a flawed bit of whataboutery, they're absolutely right that that was an appalling and unprecedented thing to do. I'm pretty sure that Trump would have pardoned Arpaio whether Clinton had pardoned Rich or not (he's strongly suggested he'll pardon himself if it comes to that, which even Nixon didn't try), but whereas the Rich pardon was almost unanimously opposed by Democrats and Republicans, the Arpaio pardon is opposed by Democrats and independents
but supported by a majority of Republicans, which suggests that partisan pardons like this in the future might be more acceptable at least among the president's partisans.