WaPo Editorial Board: Maine’s governor is completely unhinged [View all]

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

Maine’s governor is completely unhinged

By Editorial Board September 27 at 7:03 PM

A THREE-RING binder has now exposed the three-ring circus of unhinged racism and ravings that are the hallmarks of Maine’s governor, Paul LePage (R).

Mr. LePage, who entered office in 2011 refusing to attend Martin Luther King Jr. Day events or meet with representatives of the NAACP, has a long history of racial animus, and this year he has outdone himself. In January, he attributed Maine’s opioid epidemic to “guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty [who] come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home [and] half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave.”

Challenged on that assertion last month, Mr. LePage, whom few in Maine regard as the sharpest mind in state politics, dug himself a deeper hole: “Ninety-plus percent of those pictures in my book, and it’s a three-ring binder, are black and Hispanic people.” And the next day: “Black people come up the highway and they kill Mainers.”

Facts are inconvenient for Mr. LePage, who now appears to have been undone by them. A few weeks after his “90 percent-plus” assertion, Maine’s Portland Press Herald published FBI statistics showing that the overwhelming majority of those arrested in Maine for drug offenses in 2014 were white; just 14 percent were black.

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He really should move on — by resigning and seeking help, in order to spare the people of Maine more of his wild-eyed ramblings. Having menaced a Democratic state legislator in an obscenity-filled voice-mail rant, likened the IRS to the Gestapo and suggested that President Obama “go to hell,” Mr. LePage threatens to remake his state’s image from a vacation paradise of surreal natural beauty to a hotbed of hatred.

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/maines-governor-is-completely-unhinged/2016/09/27/5c318a30-84eb-11e6-a3ef-f35afb41797f_story.html?utm_term=.f2a7cd742ba6