Beheading Jan Brewer

Some folks might tell you that Arizona Governor Jan Brewer isn't emblematic of modern Republicanism. I would tell you that they're wrong. Brewer is the perfect symbol of everything that is devious, ignorant and generally wrong about the modern GOP. She's a more retarded version of Sarah Palin, without Palin's benefit of being hot enough to distract from just how dumb and allergic to personal responsibility she is.

There was a time when the GOP would have had someone like the governor deported at the end of a fucking rocket. But that was before the party made ignorance a virtue, and stupidity and laziness became campaign tactics. In so far as they have made proud and willful imbecility something to aspire to as a career choice, Jan Brewer is symbolic of your modern Republican Party.

They should be ashamed of this, but they aren't. In reducing the public discourse into hyperactive exercises in fear-mongering, demagoguery and being generally wrong, they might very well win this coming November, and Brewer is as responsible for that as anyone else. And your average Republican couldn't be more proud of her.

Mrs. Brewer came to power the old-fashioned way: she inherited the office when Janet
Napolitano was named secretary of Homeland Security in the Obama administration. Because Arizona doesn't have a lieutenant governor's office, the almost perfectly anonymous secretary of state is next in the line of succession. And the perfectly anonymous Brewer happened to be secretary of state in January of 2009.

Moreover, she was a loser. Not only was it considered a certainty that she would lose election in her own right, the smart boys in politics didn't think that she had a hope in hell of even winning the Republican primary. The smart boys didn't count on her determination to win ugly, which brings us to SB 1070.

1070 - which was written and chiefly sponsored by an insane bigot - is powerfully, violently unconstitutional in ways that you would have to be hateful, stupid, or both to consciously support. Besides being hateful and stupid, Governor Brewer had a primary to win, and signing SB 1070 into law was the easiest way to do that. 1070 also allowed Brewer to campaign against a highly unpopular federal government exercising its constitutional responsibilities in court. It was easily the most opportunist political tactic that I've ever seen, and I've spent three-quarters of my life studying political opportunism.

But that, as it almost never is, wasn't enough for a hack like Brewer. She had to go out of her way to actively make shit up in ways that further inflamed the passions of people that have no idea what they're talking about.

"Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried or just lying out there that have been beheaded."

That's a sexy, sexy narrative, which Brewer didn't want to interrupt with the fact that it's a complete fabrication, or as a polite society calls it, a fucking lie. When questioned, "law enforcement" couldn't find a single case of a violently beheaded body being found in the desert, let alone one put in that unfortunate situation by an illegal immigrant. Not. One.

The Arizona Guardian contacted the coroners' offices in Yuma, Pima, Pinal, Maricopa, Santa Cruz and Cochise counties. All of them said they'd never investigated an immigration-related crime in which someone's head had been head cut off within their respective jurisdictions.

Plenty of immigrants have died after entering the country illegally, officials with the medical examiners offices said. Some died for lack of water crossing the Arizona desert. Others were killed in violent confrontations with drug cartels that smuggle narcotics and humans.

Their statements are significant because their offices would have investigated and known about any violent deaths.

Janice Fields, who works for a private company that acts as the corner's office for Cochise County, said police have brought in two human skulls found in the desert during the past four years.

But none of them, Fields said, were the result of a beheading. Investigators identified one of the victims as a U.S. citizen, she said. The other human head remains unidentified.

Just because a skull is found, she said, doesn't mean someone's head was cut off.

"Once they die in the desert, the animals tend to get a hold of them and start moving their body parts around," Fields said.

Once Brewer made her specious claim, she had little choice but to stick with it. Besides, running on kill-happy Mexicans is easy and effective, although it raises questions as to why anyone would want to visit Arizona, what with your chances of being forcibly separated from your noggin being so high and all. Not only is "Arizona: We'll Cut Your Fucking Head Off In The Desert" a shitty tourism slogan, it looks pretty awkward on a bumper sticker.

But facts are annoying goddamned things. That's doubly true when you have what can only be described as the Hindenburg disater of campaign debates, which Governor Brewer did earlier this week.



Wow. If you know anything about politics, you've probably heard that memorizing an opening statement is perhaps the easiest thing that you can be expected to do. Governor Brewer, instead of just being impressively bad at that, was astonishingly so.

And it got worse. Magnificently worse. Worse in ways that you really only see once in a lifetime, and hope that you someday have kids to tell them about.



Brewer's performance this week was an almost sexual exercise in self-humiliation. The most surprising thing about her debate performance and it's horrible aftermath is that she didn't have her own soiled panties stuffed in her mouth during it. It's been my experience that some chicks like that. A lot. I like to refer to such women as "the Golden Girls." But enough about me.

Alas, Jan Brewer isn't a Golden Girl. She's a Republican candidate for high office, which meant that she had to backtrack on her deeply misinformed, race-baiting and counter-productive statement on beheadings in the Arizona desert.

"That was an error, if I said that," she tells AP. "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."

Except that's not what she actually said, either explicitly or implicitly. Brewer went on to say that beheaded bodies are regularly being found in the Mexican desert, which is true. But there's little reason to believe that Arizona "law enforcement" would be finding them, or reporting those findings to her. If they were, it would be a shocking violation of Mexican sovereignty.

Ordinarily, most politicians would be deeply shamed by being forced to make such a reversal. But Brewer isn't, satisfied as she is that the narrative about that state that she's governed for almost two years is an out-of-control, murderous hellhole that right-thinking Americans can't refer to as being their home without weeping is firmly established.

That's a pretty unorthodox platform. The facts actually are that both illegal immigration and violent crime in Arizona are at record low levels, unseen since the first Reagan administration, when I was in grade school, nearly thirty years ago. Most incumbents would want to emphasize something like that. Indeed, there are more than a few Democrats out there who would actually behead someone in the desert to have a record like Arizona's to run on.

That's not the Brewer strategy. Instead, she's running on an Apocalypse Now narrative that has been firmly embedded in the deeply confused American mind by the fear-mongering ghouls at Fox News and the Republican National Committee, which actually assumes that there's a difference between the two, anymore.

Most honest and serious politicians would react to be called out on her "beheadings in the desert" fiction by seriously considering an honorable suicide.

But that's not Jan's style. Governor Brewer has instead declared that she's not going to debate anymore, adding that she was Only In It For The Money. Oh, and it was public money that she was in it for, which seems fairly important to point out.

In more ways than one, Governor Jan Brewer is the original Mother of Invention.