You shoot at the enemy
And here we have Maine governor Paul LePage being “colorful.”
Paul R. LePage, the ever-combative Republican governor of Maine, refused on Friday to apologize to a Democratic state lawmaker for leaving a threatening and expletive-studded voicemail message that was criticized by some state Republicans and left top Democrats suggesting that Mr. LePage should resign.
You’ll be wanting to know what the expletives were. The Times doesn’t want to tell you, but I listened to a recording at Salon. The epithets were:
- You cocksucher.
- You little socialist son of a bitch cocksucker.
Not very gubernatorial, I think you’ll agree.
Mr. LePage did apologize in a statement Friday to the state for his choice of words in the voicemail message, but in a 35-minute news conference he said he was not apologizing directly to the Democratic state representative who was the target of his wrath, Drew Gattine. The governor said he was offended because he believed Mr. Gattine had called him a racist.
“I am enormously angry,” Mr. LePage said at his news conference, suggesting — perhaps not seriously — that he would step down if Mr. Gattine did as well. “I’m not shying away from what I called him.”
Precisely what Mr. LePage called Mr. Gattine is unprintable here, but, suffice to say, the profanity-laced voicemail message, which Mr. LePage left on Thursday and Mr. Gattine provided to The Portland Press Herald, was incendiary even by Mr. LePage’s uninhibited standards.
“Prove that I’m a racist. I’ve spent my life helping black people,” Mr. LePage said in the message. “I’m after you. Thank you.”
It’s fine that Mr Gattine gave the recording to The Portland Press Herald, because the Gov told him to make it public.
After leaving the message Thursday, Mr. LePage told reporters from The Press Herald and the television station WMTW that he would like to have a duel with Mr. Gattine, saying he would point a gun directly between Mr. Gattine’s eyes.
That’s charming. I feel so proud of the United States these days.
The episode grew out of a town-hall-style meeting on Wednesday, where, according to The Portland Press Herald, Mr. LePage told an audience member that he kept a three-ring binder of photographs of arrested drug dealers in the state, which is in the grips of a heroin crisis, and that 90 percent of them were black or Hispanic.
Mr. Gattine said he believed Mr. LePage’s comments were racially charged, but he denied calling the governor a racist.
The Guardian has more on what the Gov said on Wednesday.
At a town hall event in North Berwick on Wednesday, LePage said the majority of drug dealers arrested in Maine were black or Hispanic in origin.
“I don’t ask them to come to Maine and sell their poison,” he said, “but they come. And I will tell you that 90-plus percent of those pictures in my book, and it’s a three-ring binder, are black and Hispanic people from Waterbury, Connecticut, the Bronx and Brooklyn. I didn’t make the rules – I’m just telling you what’s happening.”
At a subsequent press conference, video of which was released by the Press Herald, he said: “Look, the bad guy is the bad guy. I don’t care what colour he is. When you go to war, if you know the enemy and the enemy dresses in red and you dress in blue, then you shoot at red.”
Addressing the state’s Republican house minority leader, Ken Fredette, a military lawyer, he said: “Don’t you? Ken, you’ve been in uniform. You shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy and the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in, are people of colour or people of Hispanic origin.”
Um.
The BBC has details of what the Gov said after leaving that phone message.
He later invited reporters from the Press Herald and WMTW TV channel to an interview to explain the voice message, and told them he wished he could shoot Mr Gattine in a duel.
“I’d like him to come up here because, tell you right now, I wish it were 1825,” Mr LePage said.
“And we would have a duel, that’s how angry I am, and I would not put my gun in the air, I guarantee you… I would point it right between his eyes, because he is a snot-nosed little runt and he has not done a damn thing since he’s been in this legislature to help move the state forward.”
It’s the Era of the Bully.
Christ rockin a jetpack. All this because somebody noted that a racially charged comment was racially charged? Methinks Ye Gov doth protest too much.
What’s in a name, anyway? Raul leRage … need to clean my glasses.
And this is an ‘electable’ person by U.S. standards.
Of course, referring to brainless redneck bigots as a substantial portion of the electorate is tewwibly ‘offensive’ and denies their ‘lived experience…’
Almost as if they were being shot at.
I’d heard the other stuff, but not the bit where he basically says “Go out and shoot people of color, because that’s how you can identify them as drug dealers, by their color.” And I can’t think of any other interpretation of what he said.