Associated Press photo
Repugnican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, a geriatric Barbie, is shown before the start of her first and last disastrous gubernatorial debate Wednesday night in Phoenix. Brewer’s speaking skills aren’t her worst crime, however; she very apparently has corrupt ties to the private prison industry, and the “breathing-while-brown” bill that she signed apparently was meant to send more business the private prison industry’s way.
Dorothy must have thrown some water on the Wicked Witch of the Southwest, Repugnican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, because Brewer had a meltdown on live television.
I have to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed watching, over and over again, the clip of Brewer freezing on live TV as she delivered her opening statement in her debate Wednesday night with her Democratic challenger Terry Goddard (who now is Arizona’s attorney general) like a nervous elementary school child delivering a book report.
Brewer’s word choice in the debate was as sophisticated as an elementary school child’s, too. This is how she opened before having a painfully long Alzheimer’s moment of silence in which she appeared not to even be able to remember her own name: “I have, uh, [long pause] done so much, and I just cannot believe that we have changed everything since I have become your governor in the last 600 days. Arizona has been brought back from its abyss….”
Yikes.
“We have changed everything”? “Arizona has been brought back from its abyss”?
Really?
The rest of the nation is still reeling from the devastation wrought not only by Hurricane Katrina but also by Hurricane George and Hurricane Dick, but under the governance of the Wicked Witch of the Southwest, Arizona is a magical oasis that has been “brought back from its abyss”?
What about Brewer’s other talking point, which is that the “illegals” have put Arizona into an abyss? Is Arizona in an abyss or has Brewer rescued it from an abyss? Which is it?
Brewer clearly isn’t fit to be governor even of Alaska. Her performance at her first and apparently final debate isn’t her only meltdown caught on tape. Rachel Maddow’s reportage of Brewer’s debate meltdown shows that Brewer struggles to speak coherently in public and that when confronted with questions from reporters who don’t lick her lily-white ass, like good reporters should, Brewer bolts like Nevada’s Sharron “Second Amendment Remedies” Angle.
And after her debacle of a debate performance, Brewer has refused to participate in any more debates from now until election day. (Her Democratic opponent has proposed that they have six debates.)
Yeah, that’s the fearless leadership that’s going to bring Arizona out of “its abyss” (or already has brought Arizona out of “its abyss” — I’m so confused…). What Arizona really needs now is an easily addled old woman who believes (as Sharron Angle believes) that the media’s job is to give her free positive publicity.
Years ago, as a reporter for the student newspaper at the University of Arizona in Tucson, I interviewed at some length Brewer’s Democratic opponent, Terry Goddard, who at that time had just been the mayor of Phoenix and was running for the governorship against Repugnican Richie-Rich frat boy Fife Symington III, who went on to beat Goddard but who later was forced to resign the governorship in disgrace after he was convicted of bank fraud in 1997.
I remember virtually nothing of my interview with Goddard (it was, after all, 20 years ago, and I don’t have a copy of the article that I wrote from that interview), but I remember being impressed with how intelligent and well-spoken — and thus virtually gubernatorially unelectable in Arizona — Goddard is.
Seriously, though: intelligent, competent, honest politicians like Goddard don’t do very well in Arizona. Arizonans prefer crooked dumbfucks like racist Mormon motherfucker Repugnican dipshit Evan Mecham, the state’s first governor to be impeached and removed from office (under a cloud of financial fraud); the felonious Fife Symington III; and Jan Alzheimer — er, Jan Brewer, whose centerpiece for her campaign for the governorship (to which she ascended after Arizona’s elected Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, was tapped to become President Barack Obama’s secretary of homeland security) has been to assert that all of the state’s problems are caused by undocumented immigrants (mostly from Mexico) — even though a new study from the Pew Hispanic Center finds that illegal immigration to the United States between 2007 and 2009 was about two-thirds less than it was between 2000 and 2005. So illegal immigration is declining, not increasing.
There’s also the interesting angle that Brewer’s campaign manager, Chuck Coughlin, also does the public relations for the Tennessee-based private prisons corporation Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) — which apparently has stood to profit from SB 1070, which the Phoenix New Times appropriately called the “breathing-while-brown” law that the racist, white supremacist Brewer enthusiastically signed into law — and that a federal judge then appropriately struck down as unconstitutional.*
“What’s the big deal with the CCA contributions [to Brewer’s political interests]?” the New Times asks and then answers: “CCA operates six prisons in Arizona, three of which house detainees for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
So apparently CCA helps Jan Brewer and Jan Brewer helps CCA by assuring that CCA has plenty of brown-skinned bodies to be incarcerated in its private prison facilities.
(Rachel Maddow also has been reporting on Brewer’s apparently corrupt ties to CCA; she did an excellent report on the matter here.)
Jan Brewer belongs not in the governor’s chair, but belongs behind bars for corruption, even though she only dutifully corruptly follows in the corrupt footsteps of her corrupt Repugnican (redundant…) predecessors Evan Mecham and Fife Symington III.
Even if she weren’t corrupt and racist and white supremacist, Brewer’s refusal to participate in any more debates demonstrates that she is utterly unfit to continue to govern Arizona, which she has made into a national pariah enough already.
P.S. I just saw this at the Arizona Republic’s website:
As for that opening statement, Brewer said in an interview [yesterday] that her mind went blank. “If someone had asked me my name, I wouldn’t have been able to tell them,” she said.
Shit, I was just joking (for the most part) when I referred to Brewer’s “painfully long Alzheimer’s moment of silence in which she appeared not to even be able to remember her own name.”
Apparently, according to Jan “What’s My Name?” Brewer herself, it was no joke.
If Arizonans actually elect this Alzheimer’s special, they’re even dumber that we of the rest of the nation already think they are.
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*In a similar vein, the Los Angeles Times reports:
The U.S. Department of Justice [yesterday] sued a controversial and popular Arizona sheriff, alleging that his department was refusing to cooperate with an investigation into whether it discriminated against Latinos while trying to catch illegal immigrants.
The Justice Department said that Maricopa County [which encompasses Phoenix and is not on the border with Mexico] Sheriff Joe Arpaio was the first local law enforcement official in 30 years to refuse to provide documents in a federal civil rights inquiry. The federal government could withhold $113 million in funding from Maricopa County if Arpaio can’t produce records demonstrating that he avoids racial discrimination.
“The actions of the sheriff’s office are unprecedented. It is unfortunate that the department was forced to resort to litigation to gain access to public documents and facilities,” said Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the department’s Civil Rights Division…
Arpaio claims that the Obama administration is playing politics, of course, but the L.A. Times also notes that
In the summer of 2008, under President George W. Bush, the Justice Department launched a preliminary investigation into the allegations of racial profiling [by Arpaio’s office]. In March 2009, after President Obama had assumed office, the department expanded the inquiry into a full-fledged probe.
What the white supremacists who run Arizona (Brewer, Arpaio, et. al.) — and their white supremacist supporters — apparently don’t get is that each state has to follow federal law, including the federal civil rights laws, and so that Arizona doesn’t get to be the South Africa of the Southwest.
Arpaio, I have to say, is a major racist, fascistic asshole who deserves to be relegated to the dustbin of white supremacist history along with Jan Brewer.
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