Hero Sheriff Joe Arpaio is the Last Obama Birther

Joe Arpaio, the hero Arizona sheriff—”America’s toughest,” by his own reckoning, since he’s the kind of dude who gives himself nicknames—has a long list of heroic deeds that includes making prisoners wear women’s underwear, forcing them into tent cities that he calls “concentration camps,” ignoring sex crimes, founding a citizen’s posse to illegally arrest suspected undocumented immigrants, falsely arresting political opponents, racial profiling, and all other manner of impressive strongman feats.

But today, Arpaio has outdone himself. Just days after the coward Donald Trump publicly dropped his claim that Obama’s birth certificate was fake, thereby stepping down from the position of de facto head birther chieftain, Sheriff Joe has vowed to fight on.

“I don’t care where he’s from,” he said to a group that is hilariously called the “Surprise Tea Party Patriots,” per The Arizona Republic. “We are looking at a forged document. Period.”

That’s classic Joe! Here are some other fun things he had to say:

“I know all the politicians say, ‘Sheriff, don’t talk about it. But how can I back down when we started it? I’m not going to just forget it.”

And, in reference to “The Surprise Tea Party Patriots,” who had apparently asked the hero sheriff to investigate way back in 2011:

“I had nothing to do with Trump on the birth certificate. We did it on our own, because of you guys.”

As for the progress of the now five-year investigation? That part, it will shock you to know, is a little murky:

I’m not going to give up, and we’re looking into it … I don’t know how it’s going to turn out.”

I’m just glad that there’s still one man in this great nation with the courage to insist, absent any proof—and in fact directly in contradiction to every piece of available evidence—that our president is not actually American.

We have a word for a man like that, folks. And that word is asshole hero.