Sheriff Arpaio throws his credibility out the birther window … First there was the pink underwear worn by jail inmates. Next came the tent cities, erected at a fraction of the cost of traditional brick and mortar jails. Finally, there were the chain gangs, a throwback to the days when the lives of inmates included hard labor, rather than weight lifting and television privileges. Through it all there was Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the elected sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who defended his regressive measures by proclaiming (correctly) that our troops in Iraq were facing similar conditions while under the threat of a war zone. In other words, stop whining. It was all an interesting take on the incarceration model, and I admit I wondered whether Joe Arpaio might be a pretty smart fellow. Now I know – Joe Arpaio is a birther … Sheriff Joe has chosen to toss his diminishing credibility into the sinkhole of gotcha politics. – thenewstribune.com

Dominant Social Theme: A waste of time and effort?

Free-Market Analysis: While the controversy over President Barack Obama's birth certificate and other important documents has not gone away, it now seems that in order to contain the damage, the President and his men have maneuvered one of the nation's most polarizing figures into becoming his chief accuser.

This may go down as a stroke of political genius.

Today, controversial sheriff Joe Arpaio has become self-identified with accusing Barack Obama of faking various personal documents. He and his Cold-Case Posse have commandeered the national stage to accuse President Obama of being illegitimate.

This may solve the question of why the documents were so clumsily manufactured. They were bait.

The documents were so badly done that various alternative news sites speculated on why the Obama administration would release such dangerous documents. See, for instance, "Clues Left in Obama 'Birth Forgery' on Purpose?"

When fighting big George Foreman, who was supposed to win, Muhammad Ali let the stronger man punch himself out while bobbing and weaving on the ropes. When Foreman's ammunition was exhausted, Ali struck back and won the fight. Ali called his strategy "rope-a-dope."

Joe Arpaio is George Foreman within the context of this boxing metaphor. Obama – or his handlers, in aggregate – are Muhammad Ali.

While Sheriff Joe may be a courageous patriot, he is also a polarizing figure that makes inmates live in tents while wearing pink underwear. If you were President Obama and faced with defusing a potentially career-ending political situation, would you want your chief accuser to be Sheriff Joe?

Note, please, that Sheriff Joe is now subject to federal prosecution for discrimination and has announced his findings regarding Obama just as his trial gets underway. The lawsuit, Melendres v. Arpaio, alleges that Arpaio's office discriminated against Latinos via checkpoints, search and seizures, etc. The larger issue is one of whether or not Arpaio is discriminating against Latinos with such apparent policies.

Arpaio – lampoonable – is now becoming a figure of fun for the Left. Most recently, high profile comedic vituperation was aimed at him by comedian George Lopez. According to an AP story, "Lopez made the comments about the top cop of Maricopa County during the debut of his solo stand-up special, 'George: It's Not Me, It's You,' which aired Saturday on HBO."

Arpaio's response was to say he was "shocked" by the comments. But one could well speculate that neither the targeted profanities nor the blizzard of stories reporting on them were coincidence …

President Barack Obama and those around him may seem foolish because their policies are so destructive, but these are very clever and ruthless people and there is a disciplined method to their actions on the political stage.

Sheriff Joe's accusations may well be accurate and correct. Further, President Obama may well be the globalists' hand-picked president with a secret agenda to ruin what is left of the freedoms in the United States so that its miserable citizens will finally accept an internationalist agenda.

But by positioning Sheriff Joe as its main accuser, Obama may have put off his day of reckoning – or at least positioned himself to cast considerable doubt on further revelations by fighting back via accusations of prejudice and general, racial discrimination.

Sheriff Joe is a military man who lived in Washington, DC early in his career, was a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics for 25 years and served in Argentina, Turkey and Mexico before heading up the DEA's Arizona branch and then running for sheriff. This is not the background of a US revolutionary, though that is certainly the role he is now playing.

Those who want to vanish down the rabbit hole entirely may want to consider whether Sheriff Joe is a staunch adversary of Obama or whether he is in some sense complicit with this larger scenario.

Perhaps it is unfair to bring up such a scenario, but given the bizarreness of the current scene, nothing seems entirely beyond contemplation.