Not that a politician caught stating a mis-truth is shocking news to anyone, but this particular lie was pure gasoline poured onto the already-raging firestorm surrounding illegal immigration:
In a column released online today, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank noted that Arizona Republican governor Jan Brewer, a strong proponent of her state’s controversial immigration bill, has claimed that Arizona’s “law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried or just lying out there that have been beheaded.”
As Milbank noted, the Arizona Guardian checked that claim out and found no evidence of beheadings; Brewer’s office did not respond to a request from the columnist for documentation for the beheading claim.
Months later, as Brewer campaigns to remain Arizona’s governor, she finally admits she might have, sort of, kind of, not really told the truth:
But the claim has come back to haunt her after her stammering debate performance in which she failed to back it up and ignored repeated questions on the issue from a scrum of reporters.
Brewer has spent the time since backtracking and trying to repair the damage done from her cringe-worthy debate against underdog challenger Terry Goddard.
“That was an error, if I said that,” the Republican told the Associated Press on Friday. “I misspoke, but you know, let me be clear, I am concerned about the border region because it continues to be reported in Mexico that there’s a lot of violence going on and we don’t want that going into Arizona.”
She said she was referring to beheadings and other cartel-related violence in Mexico in comments she made earlier this summer about decapitated bodies found in the state’s southern region.
No, that’s not what she was referring to. She didn’t say anything about headless bodies found in Mexico, unless Arizona law enforcement is now engaging in operations south of the border (emphasis added):
Appearing on a local television show Sunday morning, Gov. Jan Brewer described how bad Arizona’s illegal immigration problem has gotten.
“Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried or just lying out there that have been beheaded,” she said.
No reasonably literate person could read that statement and interpret it to mean that she was referring to drug war violence in Mexico. Brewer lied in a grandstanding attempt to gin up support for the state’s fascist anti-immigration bill. Everybody knows she lied, including her Democratic opponent in the governor’s race, the press, and most other people paying attention. Unfortunately, that doesn’t include Arizona voters, who still favor her over Goddard by a nearly two-to-one margin.
What’s worse, Brewer’s mendacity, or the Arizona electorate’s gullibility? It’s an embarrassment in either case.
