Joe Arpaio Has a Pretty Pathetic Excuse For Getting Played By Sacha Baron Cohen

Fresh off his hilariously humiliating interview with Sacha Baron Cohen, fascist former lawman, convicted criminal, and liver-spotted prune Joe Arpaio is making amends. Kind of.

“Quite frankly, I made a bad mistake security-wise,” Arpaio told the Washington Examiner, when asked about his chat with what he thought was a Finnish YouTube celebrity. “They said, ‘we’re doing a feature for Showtime—the top 20 people in the United States.’ It looked pretty nice [that] I made the top people.”

Vain and racist? Sheriff Joe, you contain multitudes.

But perhaps most interesting in Arpaio’s mea culpa is this exchange, in which he really gets to the core of his misinterpretation:

So he’s talking and I couldn’t understand him. He’s talking about golden showers. I thought he was talking about — the president has gold [in his shower].

“And then handjob,” Arpaio continued. “What was that? He was talking about illegals coming over working with their hands on their job.

While it’s true that Trump does indeed have a gold-plated bathroom (the better to shit in, my dear) Arpaio is dead wrong about the “hand job” section of his segment. Here, verbatim, is what Cohen said in the interview:

Cohen: My first job was a hand job from my mother. It was newspapers. What was your first hand job?

Arpaio: So, let me say this. Me. Whatever I did in my life, I always did that extra. It gets me in trouble sometimes.

Cohen: You wanted to give the best hand job possible.

Arpaio: Extra, sometime.

As you can see, there’s nothing mentioned about illegal immigration, or immigration at all. Given the fact that Arpaio is a crusty old racist, though, it’s not surprising that he’d leap to blaming “illegals” for his own damn screw up.