This is your regular reminder that the governor of one of our fine American states is, in fact, rather insane.
Last month, Governor Paul LePage announced that he would not deliver Maine’s State of the State address this year, breaking with decades of tradition. In lieu of the speech, LePage today sent a letter to legislative leaders.
That's not terribly insane, is it? A bit rude and dismissive, perhaps, but doesn't really sink to the level of crackpot-ism. Until you look at the contents of the letter, which consists of a long haranguing of his enemies for their imagined shortcomings.
LePage’s new favorite insult is apparently “socialist” and he uses a variation of the word 13 times in the 8-page note, blaming a “foreign socialist ideology” for everything from deaths due to heroin overdoses (an issue the legislature has actually found bipartisan consensus on) to Maine’s electricity rates (which are the lowest in New England and have fallen significantly in recent years, something LePage has had little to do with).
For example:
For the past year, socialist politicians in Augusta have been dragging my Administration's employees before a kangaroo court and plotting meaningless impeachment proceedings. While your colleagues were engaged in these silly public relations stunts, Mainers were literally dying in the streets. [...]
The efforts by Maine socialists to turn our state into Greece, Cuba, Venezuela or the former Soviet Union are moving us backwards at a rapid pace. Socialism is blockading our path to prosperity.
And so on and so forth, what with these kids today and their loud music and meth labs and functioning legislature.
So that's the State of Paul LePage's mind. It's a curious place he finds himself in: Too crazy to effectively govern a state, but not quite crazy enough to be presidential material. I still think he could be Trump or Cruz's vice presidential pick, though. Now there's a job for a crackpot.