A Tale of Two "Sheriff Joes"

Topic: Elections

America used to have a Sheriff Joe who was unafraid to get his hands dirty and do what was needed to keep his constituents safe.  In the world of law enforcement, that can lead to some undesired outcomes, like being strung up in kangaroo courts for supposed profiling measures or being tarred and feathered in the press until you are no longer able to stand in front of a general electorate.  I am referencing former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Arpaio was pushed out of office by the current Sheriff, Paul Penzone, in 2016, in an election that saw Donald Trump carry Maricopa County with fewer votes than Mitt Romney had four years prior.  Since Arpaio has been gone, Maricopa has turned into the villain capital of at least the American west, if not the entire country.  Arizona is now governed by illegally elected statewide candidates who benefitted from major corruption in 2018, 2020, and 2022, and they, like the Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, do nothing to combat cartel activity, open borders, and the drug and human trafficking that is turning the American Dream to the American Nightmare.

While Arpaio admitted to technical violations of various policies or injunctions, the prosperity and relative tranquility of Maricopa County during his 24-year tenure was undeniable.  He was well known for his extreme no-frills treatment of prisoners that served as an active deterrent for the public to engage in lives of crime.  Unfortunately, the Maricopa Sheriff’s Office was stripped of its ability to combat illegal immigration in 2013, by design, in the days of Barack Obama’s lawless presidency.

Arpaio did the following:
*Required jailed illegal aliens to register for the draft

*Set up a “tent city” for prisoners to live in

*Instituted chain gangs

*Boasted about how his policies were popular because he kept getting re-elected (very true)

Would you want to be in a Maricopa jail with standards like this?  Of course not.  You’d choose Los Angeles, or perhaps, Las Vegas, where the other Sheriff Joe was elected Sheriff of Clark County in 2014, to run your criminal enterprise and get off easy.  Joe Lombardo had been in office less than three years when the Mandalay Bay shooting occurred, and to this day, more questions than answers are present in what appears to be a giant cover-up surrounding that horrific incident.  He still managed to win reelection by a massive margin a year later, and rode that title, and supposed electability in the state’s largest county (more than two-thirds of the vote), to the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 2022.  In reality, Lombardo had allowed crime to fester in Las Vegas, forced vaccine mandates on his deputies, and backed Democrat governor Steve Sisolak, who said:

I’ve known Joe for a long time. Joe was a contributor to my campaign.  He was an early supporter and raised money for me.

This author backed former boxing standout Joey Gilbert for Republican nominee for the duration of the 2022 primary process, but he supposedly came up 16,023 votes short of Lombardo in the proceedings.  Lombardo used his perch to affirm his devotion to abortion rights and, most upsetting to me, said there was not enough cheating in Nevada’s 2020 presential race to give the win to Trump if it were removed.  This makes Joe Lombardo an election fraud denier in a state Trump clearly won with ease.  Keep in mind, Nevada mailed out ballots in 2020 to the entire voter roll, regardless of how many of those entries were tied to fictitious beings, duplicated, or assigned to ineligible voters.

The three candidates everyone had their eyes on in Nevada’s 2022 midterms were Lombardo, lifelong candidate Adam Laxalt (for U.S. Senate), and Jim Marchant (for Secretary of State).  Along with Arizona’s Mark Finchem, Marchant, a militant fraud affirmer, competed for what was arguably the most important tactical position up for grabs in 2022, one that would have allowed the office holder to expose election fraud in a big way.  In hindsight, a Laxalt victory would have given the GOP control of the U.S. Senate.

Marchant and Laxalt, along with Lombardo, were winning comfortably on election night, and held leads for a few days.  Laxalt put out this doozy of a tweet on Election Day +1…

…only to lose the election by 8,000 votes after Clark and Washoe Counties counted until his opponent, incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto, won.  Laxalt proceeded to concede a fraudulent election result at the behest of his advisors, citing Nevada’s election laws that allow for drop box ballots to be counted a week after Election Day, washing away blowout Republican margins in disproportionately small GOP counties in the interior of the state.

But one prominent Republican, the winning GOP Lieutenant Governor not included, held his lead.  Joe Lombardo was rubber stamped into office with a margin of just over 15,000 votes.  See, Nevada has fair elections, and a Republican governor to boot.