You would think that after Joe Arpaio got duped into accepting a hypothetical blowjob from Donald Trump while unboxing children’s toys with Sacha Baron Cohen’s Finnish YouTube celebrity character OMGWhizzBoyOMG, he would have thought twice before sitting down for an interview with cartoon news anchors. But no.
On Thursday night, the former Maricopa County sheriff, who skirted prison time thanks to a pardon from President Donald Trump, became the latest victim of Stephen Colbert’s Tooning Out the News.
Appearing as a guest on the Morning Joe-inspired Inside the Hill, Arpaio was forced to sit there quietly for more than three minutes at the top of the segment as the animated hosts listed off his many “atrocities” to his face. Occasionally, they would add comments like, “You should be doing this interview from inside a glass box” or that his actions were “something evangelicals should be upset about, but for some, odd, definitely-not-skin-colored-related reason, aren’t.”
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Then came the first question: “What’s even crazier is the people of Maricopa County re-elected you five times. When did you discover your love of bigoted sadism was shared by so many people in America’s fourth most populous county?”
“I don’t have 50 hours to answer your Mickey Mouse questions,” Arpaio stammered in response. “But let me summarize. I still have faith in the people of this county and this country.” When he boasted about his 24 years as sheriff, another host asked him if he thinks the streets “would have been safer if instead of jailing Latinos” he had “jailed the people sadistic enough to vote” for him.
“You’re calling the people sadistic that voted for me?” Arpaio asked in response. “The millions and millions of people who voted for me are sadistic? I don’t think that’s true.”
It only got worse for Arpaio from there as the cartoon hosts compared him to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and even worked him into their fake ads for Medical Healing Solutions neck braces to protect against “whiplash” and another touting Medical for All: “Because Americans deserve to live long enough to watch Joe Arpaio die.”
“Excuse me, you’re using my name for the advertisement?” Arpaio asked incredulously. “What company is that? They ought to be paying me for it.”
“Uh-huh, atrocity lawyers are not cheap,” host Richard Ballard answered before adding, “Let’s talk about how you were allowed to feast on America’s organs before bursting out its chest.”
“What’s that?” a confused Arpaio replied. “I don’t know where you’re getting this. Organs?”
Moving on to Trump’s pardon, Ballard asked, “Do you feel lucky that your conviction for genocidal law enforcement practices fell during our most genocide-fetishizing modern presidency?”
And later, cartoon analyst Teddy Hopper asked him, “Now I don’t want to seem like a hokey idealist, but can we look forward to a day where people will take the biggest shits imaginable on your grave?”
When Arpaio declined to answer, the anchor ended the segment by saying, “I just remembered that life is fleeting and it’s not worth wasting another second haranguing a monster, no matter how much he deserves to live by himself on salt flats. So let’s wrap it there!”
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