The Arpaio Follies begin to get some national reviews

Both the LA Times and Talking Points memo have major pieces up on Joe Arpaio and Andrew Thomas, the Dimmer Twins.

The Times story concentrates on the continuing range war between arpaio and his political enemies, with a special focus on just trying to lay out the scope of it all. The thing is 1200 words long and still manages to glide over a lot of Arpaio’s nuttiness.

You don’t hear much about the the tag team legal brutality he engages in with Andrew Thomas, and the the story doesn’t even mention the late-night arrests of the owners of the Phoenix New Times.

The result is long passages like this:

has escalated his tactics in recent months, not only defying the federal government but launching repeated investigations of those who criticize him. He recently filed a racketeering lawsuit against the entire Maricopa County power structure. On Thursday night, the Arizona Court of Appeals issued an emergency order forbidding the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office from searching the home or chambers of a Superior Court judge who was named in the racketeering case.

Last year, when Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon called for a federal investigation of Arpaio’s immigration enforcement, the Sheriff’s Office demanded to see Gordon’s e-mails, phone logs and appointment calendars.

When the police chief in one suburb complained about the sweeps, Arpaio’s deputies raided that town’s City Hall.

My biggest criticism of the LAT piece is its over-reliance on he-said/she said balance.

Sure: We hear lines like, “It’s just extraordinary, the kind of thing that takes place in Third World dictatorships”—but they come not from a neutral observer but from Don Stapley’s lawyer, which minimizes the force of it in readers’ minds.

Further, the story contains no hint of what will be Arpaio’s ultimate role, which will be target of a federal investigation. When the criminal sheriff is ultimately removed from office, stories like this will seem pretty timid.

Meanwhile, Talking Points Memo has a good overview of the current shenanigans created by the Dimmer twins in a new round of intimidation tactics against local judges. The writer, is less complacent about federal intervention:

The Justice Department could step in and end Arpaio and Thomas’s reign of terror, which threatens the integrity of the entire judicial and law enforcement systems for the nations’ fourth-most populous county. But DOJ appears to be working at a leisurely pace: its probe has been underway for over a year, and there’s no sign that it’s having any effect in checking Arpaio’s actions.

And finally, speaking of New Times, Michael Lacey, the chain’s top editor and one of the owners who was arrested in 2007, has an expansive cover story this week called The Pink Negro.

The title is a reference—one I find pretty indigestible—to Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro.” (The idea is that Obama is a buttoned-up preppy black.)

Leaving that aside, Lacey’s thesis is that the Obama administration is taking too long is investigating:

Yes, [Obama’s] federal investigators are here examining the assaults against human rights perpetrated by Sheriff Joe Arpaio and County Attorney Andrew Thomas.

But, after 20 months, we must ask: Are they unearthing evidence or burying it?

There is, as yet, no remedy, no redress, no recourse.

President Obama, unwittingly, put the glacial timeline of his Arpaio/Thomas investigation into perspective during his speech to America last week. He said his troop surge will see our soldiers depart Afghanistan after 19 more months of combat. In other words, the war with al-Qaeda and the Taliban will end triumphantly in less time than the feds have spent — without result — probing Arpaio and Thomas.

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon formally summoned a Justice Department task force in April 2008. As we usher in 2010, federal officials have yet to contact the very first political victim of the sheriff and the county attorney. Critical documents remain unexamined.

In the source of making its case the extravagantly long piece is an effective overview of the current state of Arpaio’s many, many criminal enterprises.