...the face of Arizona law enforcement had been Republican Joe Arpaio, the tough-talking sheriff in Maricopa County known for housing jail inmates in tents, ...
But hours after an assailant shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed six bystanders, there was a new Arizona sheriff in town. His name is Clarence W. Dupnik. He's a Democrat and a Rachel Maddow fan. And when he linked the Tucson shooting rampage to harsh conservative rhetoric, he drew cheers from some and brickbats from others.
.....just as Pima County and Tucson are overshadowed by the more conservative megalopolis of Maricopa County and Phoenix to the north, Dupnik has been overshadowed by the more media-hungry Arpaio.
No more. On Saturday, Dupnik, a friend of Giffords and a federal judge killed in the attack, spoke during a nationally televised news conference:
"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona I think has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."
Dupnik hasn't backed down from his remarks, even though no ties have publicly surfaced between the suspect in the shootings and conservative political groups. In an interview Sunday, Dupnik had the air of a man who had reached his limits and couldn't remain quiet any longer.
"They don't like to see us trying to tone that down," Dupnik said, referring to criticism of his call for civility. "Most of those people would wish I would never say anything like that."
Dupnik's comments cheered many residents of this relatively liberal town.
...But it also horrified many conservatives.
The Irresponsible Sheriff Dupnik Ignores All Real Evidence in Case
Rush Limbaugh - January 10, 2011
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Fox News is reporting that the Loughner family has taken down their kid’s shrine to the occult. He had a skull. It was really a weird thing. The police are banning all media from the street and from his parents’ house. That’s understandable but there have been pictures taken. You could see it at certain places on the Internet, pictures of the shrine. There’s a skull back there. It’s really weirdo consult stuff. Also there’s a friend of Loughner’s who’s finally spoken out at Mother Jones who said that he had a real animus toward Gabrielle Giffords, that he went to a number of her public appearances, asked her questions, was not satisfied with her answers, thought that she was not respecting him and so forth — and this is somebody who knew the kid.
People in school where he went were afraid to show up. They sat next to doors because they feared he’d bring a gun and start wiping everybody out. This sheriff out there, Sheriff Dupnik, you know, this guy, he’s gotta be very careful. If I were him I wouldn’t say another word about this. The Loughner family has just hired the Unabomber attorney to defend their son (which everybody has to have an attorney, no big deal there). But the sheriff is out saying that everybody but the kid’s responsible for this. This sheriff is creating a defense for this kid in which his attorneys can say, “Well, even law enforcement authorities here in Pima County are blaming talk radio and Fox News and Sarah Palin.”
“Well, where’s the evidence?”
“Well, there’s no evidence. He’s in law enforcement.”
I’ll tell you what. I’m just wildly speculating here, but this kid sounds like he was well known as an unstable, dangerous element in the neighborhood and at school and so forth around town. If this kid... If there are any reports in this sheriff’s office like if people have phoned in, made phone calls, “Hey, we’re worried about this kid. He’s running around threatening here.” If the kid, if this kid’s run around and if he’s made death threats to anybody... If there’s a file in this sheriff’s office about this guy’s behavior, if there is, then the onus is gonna be on this sheriff and the rest of the liberal safety net. Where is all the stuff in place to stop this? Where is it?
We spend trillions of dollars on a safety net designed to help just this kind of deranged person and to make sure they don’t pose a threat to anybody in their immediate orbit. Where was local law enforcement? It might well be that the sheriff is out trying to dump on everybody else to absolve himself and his own office. Who knows? But if I were the sheriff, I would be very careful here because he’s constructing defense scenarios for the kid and the legal team that might not bode well. And he’s admitting, he admitted to Megyn Kelly on Fox yesterday afternoon, that he has got no evidence for what he’s saying. And they asked him, ‘You want to back down from that?”
“Oh, no, no! I’m not gonna back down. Everybody knows political discourse is too vitriolic. We gotta get back to people getting along,” and he wants to try to tell everybody he’s nonpartisan! Heh-heh-heh-heh. Just — just typical.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: The sheriff. Clarence Dupnik, Pima County, Arizona. Megyn Kelly talked to him on Fox yesterday. “Sheriff, why? I feel silly asking the question. Who can explain the mind of somebody like this? Was there something about Giffords that set the shooter off?”
DUPNIK: There are a whole lot of people in this country that are very angry at the politics of people like Gabrielle. There was a lot of vitriolic statements made night and day on radio and TV about her support of health care, about her support of some of the other things, and some of the vitriol got a lot of people agitated. You took the words out of my mouth. You’re talking about irrational behavior here, and there’s no way that I think of that you can rationalize irrational behavior.
RUSH: All right, so you just heard him blame me and talk radio and all of this stuff. Megyn Kelly said, “Do you have any evidence, Sheriff?”
DUPNIK: I don’t have that information yet. The investigation is in its very initial phases. But my belief, and I’ve been watching what’s going on in this country for the last 75 years, and I’ve been a police officer for over 50 years. There’s no doubt in my mind that when a number of people, night and day, try to inflame the public that there’s going to be some consequences from doing that, and I think it’s irresponsible to do that.
KELLY: Sounds like you’re being very honest that that’s just your speculation and it’s not anything that’s fact-based at this point.
DUPNIK: That’s my opinion, period.
RUSH: No facts. You got a man of the law saying: “I don’t have any evidence, I don’t have any proof. There’s no facts. Of course not, I’m a Democrat! I’m nonpartisan. I’m a Democrat, what do I need facts? I don’t need evidence.” We all know what’s going on here. That’s what he wants everybody to believe. That’s irresponsible to boot.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Has anybody found any evidence what this Loughner guy listened to on the radio? Has anybody fond any evidence he listened to talk radio? No. Has anybody found any evidence that he watched Fox News? No. Has anybody found any evidence that he read Sarah Palin’s Facebook page — and if he did, what of it? The guy listened to heavy metal music. That’s what he was into: Heavy metal, and some of the anarchical stuff that you find in heavy metal and the devil worship or the, you know, weirdo occult religious stuff that you find on heavy metal. Now, see if this doesn’t jog your memory. Over the course of the 23 years that I have been doing this program, there have been several occasions where conservatives have appeared before congressional committees.
I think one of them one time was the wife of James Baker and the wife of Algore. Yes, that’s right. Susan Baker and Tipper Gore joined forces to try to get all violence on television taken off, on the theory that violence was not good for our culture; that all the violence on television, all of the violence in our music was coarsening our culture. Did the left agree? It did not. They pooh-poohed the notion. Hollywood, the TV and movie industry mobilized and got right in the face of all of those who wanted to have warnings and do other things to limit the amount of violence in television and movies. They hee-hawed, and they pooh-poohed the notion that violence in movies or on television could in any way be said to have a causal relationship with violence in real life.
“Violence in movies? Come on, it’s just a television show! Come on, it’s just a movie!” There were people that wanted to try to say Columbine was the result of the Matrix movies, if you’ll recall and the Hollywood establishment, which you all know is a bunch of liberals, said, “You can’t make that association! That’s silly. That’s stupid. These are two deranged kids. But now they are sooo upset and sooo concerned that some kid might see a target symbol on a website from a year ago and be moved to kill. So we’ve gotta get rid of “rhetoric.” We have to get rid of conservative speech. We have to silence Fox News. We have to silence talk radio. We have to silence conservatism.
But violence on television? All I’m pointing out here is that these people are nothing but pure political partisans and hypocrites, and they are embarrassing. Watching mass murder in movies? Saw I through Saw V? Nightmare On Elm Street X. All these things that young kids flock to? “Oh, no, no. That doesn’t have any effect. Violent, vile stuff and hip-hop or rap? No, no, that’s not a problem! That would never affect anybody. Come on, that’s just entertainment.” Only conservative speech can incite violence they say. That’s what they’re asking people to believe, and, I’m sorry, the American people are waaay ahead of them now. The silly notion that conservative speech that this guy never even heard, that websites he never visited...
This guy’s too busy building occult altars, listening to heavy metal. This guy zonked out on dope most of his life. This guy is so into marijuana, he wants it to become the new currency of the United States! We’re dealing with a genuinely, unfortunately, insane individual, and everybody around him knew it. Who did anything about it? Nobody. And now that this kid’s finally acted, “We gotta get conservatives off the air!” It’s laughable. Truly laughable. One more of the Sheriff Clarence Dupnik with Megyn Kelly yesterday afternoon on Fox. She finally said, “I know you ran for office. I’m sure some of our viewers are asking themselves why you are putting a political spin on this. They may be asking you, ‘Sheriff, you’re just not focused on the facts here, you don’t have any evidence.’”
DUPNIK: I grew up in a country that was totally different from the country that we have today. We didn’t have this kind of nonsense going on, and it used to be that politicians from different parties could sit down, forget about their ideology, and work on the country’s problems. We don’t see that happening today. As a matter of fact, we see just the opposite. We see one party trying to block the attempts of another party to make this a better country.
RUSH: There you have it. That’s a sheriff, the Pima County sheriff upset that “one party is trying to block the attempts of another party to make this a better country.” In other words, one party wants to make this a worse country. Now, we know who he’s talking about here. This guy wants us to believe he’s nonpartisan. This guy is an anti-conservative, anti-Republican. He’s no different than the media. He has taken the occasion of this, a law enforcement officer, to politicize it, to advance his own political agenda, which he claims he doesn’t even have. He’s that pure. Like I say, this guy better dial it back because he’s creating a defense for this guy that the crafty team of lawyers that are gonna be assembling here will be able to use.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Brian in Tucson. Nice to have you, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, thank you, sir, for taking my phone call. Mr. Limbaugh, it is an honor and a privilege to speak with you, sir.
RUSH: Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
CALLER: The reason for my phone call, Mr. Limbaugh, I am listening to the show. I’m not a big listener, but I am a staunch conservative and many, many of my clients and my friends here in Tucson know. But I am getting sick to my stomach at the way the liberal media is portraying Tucson and portraying the Tea Party activists out here and how they are causing damage to the way we are out here. We are a community of just under a million people. It’s a diversified melting pot. Sure, we have our problems just like any other city out here in the US. But what this certain individual did was something that he did on his own accord you without any help from anybody. Now, I will tell you this, though. The house that he has this little cult, the statue of skulls in is not at his mother’s house. His mother had no idea that this was going on because he didn’t live with her. He lived in another area, in another place and had this going on. Now, this is only with what I’m getting from the local scene here from people that are around in this area.
RUSH: Well, I’m hearing conflicting reports. Fox News even sent a reporter out there and a neighbor let ‘em in. The police had it cordoned out, but a neighbor let Fox News and their cameras in to try to get a picture of the altar, but the reporter from Fox said it’s been taken down. There are reports about the young man’s parents. I’ve just seen one. The neighbor said they’re loners. They didn’t talk to anybody. If they did see anybody they ran back into the house. They didn’t seem to have any friends or any of that. Frankly, I don’t care where the altar was. He had one. It’s an indication of his mental disposition. At any rate, you’re upset that this is happening to Tucson. Well, welcome to the Drive-By Media. They blew into town on Saturday. Their cameras and microphones are shooting everything up, and by the middle of the week they’ll be gone for the most part (there will be some stragglers) and they’ll be on down the road heading for the next place to shake up and roil and moving on to gun control. That’s where this will next go.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, what is this Sheriff Dupnik? Who is he to be telling anybody how to run their lives? Look at what a stellar job he is doing protecting the citizens of Pima County from illegal aliens and from drug dealers. Where was the...? If this guy was so concerned about the Tea Party, and he was so concerned about the political discourse, so concerned about all these things, where was security for this congresswoman’s meeting on Saturday? It is this sheriff, the Pima County sheriff, Dupnik, who is calling Arizona “a Mecca for hate and bigotry,” which is like that other Arizona representative who was trashing Arizona and calling for a boycott, and this is the left. This is the American left today. If anybody is coarsening our politics, it’s them. If anybody is roiling normalcy, if it’s anybody who just won’t shut up and leave people alone and let them live their lives, it’s the American left.
If there’s anybody who just won’t leave us alone? They have to constantly be tinkering with what we eat, what we smoke, what we drive, where we drive, where we go, what we say, what we can’t say. Just back off. And again, I want to stress: Any time any conservative group has popped up and been critical and worried about the violence in movies and television shows, the very same people blaming conservative rhetoric for all of this that happened Saturday and the Oklahoma City bombing, the same people say, “No, no, no, no. Violence in movies and television shows? No, no. Rap music? No, no, that’s not a factor. We can’t ban works of art like that. You’re crazy!” So they’re hypocrites, in addition to everything else.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: One of this kid’s friends is on television saying he didn’t like political discussions. He’d rather talk philosophy. He didn’t like political discussions. Right. A kid that didn’t like political discussions was inspired to commit murder because of conservative rhetoric, but he didn’t like political discussions at all.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Steve in Sterling, Illinois, you’re next on the EIB Network. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Good morning, Rush. Thanks for taking my call. Yeah, I had to work over the weekend so I really didn’t have time. I wasn’t attached to the news very much, so I had to do a lot of catching up Sunday night. And I looked and I looked and I looked because I heard everybody talking about this guy, “Oh, he’s influenced by Sarah Palin. He was influenced by this kind of rhetoric,” but nobody ever said anything about his possible political leanings — and that made me curious right then and there ‘cause every time like way they did with Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Whenever you hear the media be very silent about those kinds of things, it usually doesn’t mean that they were a right-wing kind of person because if they were, if they found a.... If it was the opposite of what happened to Kaczynski, if they found a dog-eared copy of Sarah Palin’s book in his room, at his house, you woulda heard about it within a couple hours. But I had to search and search and I finally found I think it was the Tucson paper, Phoenix paper, I’m not sure which one it was, that made a report about former classmates of his that were sending her tweets and she was Twittering about his very left-leaning rhetoric and that he was a very liberal, angry young man, and you don’t hear about that. I’m not hearing about that anywhere.
RUSH: No. What you are seeing, if you look carefully on the blogs and other leftist websites, they’re doing their best to destroy that female student friend of his. She described herself as back and forth, liberal to Libertarian, but they’re doing their best to destroy her as a source because she’s describing this guy as, if he was anything politically, he was a leftist.
CALLER: I mean anybody comes out with anything, like you say, that doesn’t fit their template, you have to destroy ‘em. It doesn’t matter whether she’s telling the truth or not, that doesn’t even enter into the equation.
RUSH: Exactly right. Exactly right. Was there a time, Steve, how many years ago where you would have been believed Sarah Palin was behind this, that you would have believed all the media is saying?
CALLER: Oh, me myself? No.
RUSH: Okay.
CALLER: See, that’s where I was saying. During the whole Unabomber thing I remember following that very closely.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Then when the brother turned him in, even years later, unless it’s somebody like you or Sean Hannity, if you don’t listen to your show, you’d never know.
RUSH: That’s right.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We have more of the sheriff, by the way. Audio sound bite number eight and in order, Saturday night. This is before he appeared with Megyn Kelly on Fox on Sunday. Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik held a press conference to talk about the mass shooting, and we have three sound bites from that press conference.
DUPNIK: It’s time as a country that we to do (sic) a little soul-searching, because I think the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business and what we see on TV and how our youngsters are being raised that this has not become the nice United States of America that most of us grew up in, and I think it’s time that we do the soul-searching.
RUSH: So here you had an unfortunate event, many people shot, killed, wounded, and it’s “people in the radio business and some people in the TV business and what we see on TV and how our youngsters are being raised...” You mean like the shooter, Sheriff? How was the shooter being raised, Sheriff? In your community, Sheriff? The shooter did what he did in your community! You’re in charge of keeping that community safe, Sheriff. What did you do? Was this the first time you heard about the shooter or did you have knowledge of the shooter before this? I would wager that the sheriff knew of this shooter long before this event, but the sheriff has gone ahead now with these comments, and he’s given... (chuckles) He has given the defense a case. My guess is the sheriff wouldn’t mind president shooter’s acquitted. After all, it’s not the shooter’s fault! If you carry the sheriff’s logic all the way out. (interruption)
Well, what do you mean, H.R.? If the sheriff’s gonna speculate, I’m gonna speculate. How does it feel?
“Hey, Sheriff, I’ll betcha hope he’s acquitted, right?”
“What do you know about it, Limbaugh?”
“I don’t know anything. I just know how liberals are, Sheriff. I think you probably have a tough time putting the guilty behind bars ‘cause it’s always somebody else’s fault, right, Sheriff? It’s never the guilty’s fault. They didn’t do it, somebody made ‘em do it, right, Sheriff? Oh, what a great signal that would send to have this guy acquitted. That would be good, wouldn’t it? That’d make people stand up.”
“Limbaugh, do you have any proof what you’re saying about him?”
“No, I don’t have any proof — and the sheriff doesn’t, either. The difference is I’m just a guy on the radio. I can’t do one thing to people. The sheriff can, although he didn’t in this case.”
So a reporter said, “Hey, Sheriff, can you say anything about a possible motive for this?”
DUPNIK: When you look at unbalanced people, how they are — how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government; the anger, the hatred, the, uh, bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous.
RUSH: Stop the tape a second. Who is it that’s tearing down the government? Who is it that’s running around apologizing for the country all over the world, Sheriff? Who is it that’s running around admitting to dictators and thugs around the world the US is guilty? Who’s doing that, Sheriff? The President of the United States is, Sheriff. American Democrats during the presidential campaign. I couldn’t tell you the difference between what they were saying about this country and what the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was saying about this country, Sheriff. When I hear an American hater in Europe or in Asia or the Middle East talk, sounds to me like your average Democrat running a campaign. I can’t tell the difference, Sheriff.
Who is it, Sheriff, that’s tearing down the government? Who is it, Sheriff, tearing down the country? Who is it, Sheriff, that doesn’t like the Constitution? Who is it saying people who like the Constitution have a “fetish”? Who’s saying that, Sheriff? And by contrast, Sheriff, who’s defending the country? Who’s trying to save country from people from destroying it the way it was founded? Who’s doing that, Sheriff? What really is the source of all this vitriol, Sheriff? Do you think people should just sit around and let their futures be stolen with all this debt and all this spending? You think people ought to just sit around and accept the fact that their opportunity for prosperity is whittling away because a political party sees fit to destroy political and economic opportunity, Sheriff? You think? We should just sit around here, Sheriff, and watch all this destruction of our country and economy take place?
Who’s doing it, Sheriff? The Republicans haven’t had any power for two years, Sheriff. For two years the Republicans have not been able to stop one thing that has led to the erosion and destruction of the US economy, Sheriff. The Republicans and conservatives haven’t been able to do one thing. If anybody’s unhappy out there, Sheriff, it can’t be Republicans. They haven’t done anything! They haven’t been able. They haven’t had the political power to do a damn thing, Sheriff. You might want to look again at this, Sheriff, because you’re indicting your own side here. By the way, Sheriff, your words here are pretty vitriolic. I mean, are you prepared for whatever might result from these words of yours? “Tearing down the government, the anger, the hatred, the bigotry”? You’re calling a lot of people a lot of names here, Sheriff. You’re supposed to be a nonpartisan lawman. You’re calling a lot of people names here. Can you be sure that you’re not gonna inspire another lunatic to pick up a gun? Here’s the rest of the sheriff’s conversation.
DUPNIK: And, unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.
REPORTER: Was this related then, possibly, to prejudice and bigotry or...?
DUPNIK: Pardon?
REPORTER: Was this related then, possibly, to prejudice and bigotry?
DUPNIK: All I can tell you is that there’s reason to believe that this individual may have a mental issue, and I think that people who are unbalanced are especially susceptible to vitriol.
RUSH: Yeah? Vitriol? What about real life? What’s more harmful, Mr. Sheriff, an economy being destroyed and people losing their jobs and no hope of getting them back or a bunch of talking about it? What really, Aheriff, is having more impact on people’s lives: The fact they can’t get a job? The fact that every so-called effort to create jobs destroys more jobs? What really is causing people to have some angst out there, Sheriff? Did you really say this, Sheriff: “Arizona is the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry”? You’re a lawman there, Sheriff. You’re supposed to be able to do something about putting away people that behave criminal way because of prejudice or bigotry. You live in the capital of it? You live in the capital of prejudice? Obviously the sheriff is talking here about illegal immigration. Sheriff, have you seen the movie Machete?
Dawn, I don’t want to watch Machete. You don’t want your daughters to watch Machete. You seen it, Brian? Brian, you’d like to. Sheriff, you ought to go watch Machete. I think it’s a fictional story that takes place in your state, Sheriff. If it’s not your state, it’s Texas but you might want to take a look at the movie and ask yourself: Did the shooter ever see the movie, Sheriff? Machete? Well, it would be worth it, Sheriff. It’s all about the issue you claim is leading to prejudice and bigotry in your state. If you go watch this movie, folks, be very careful. This is blood and gore and guts, like you’ve never seen before. Well, not never seen before, but it’s up there in the top ten. Be careful. Sheriff, you ought to go watch the movie.
Who knows? You might agree with it, Sheriff, for all I know listening to you speak.
END TRANSCRIPT
