On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, as well as 2017, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published profiles of Maine Governor Paul LePage, who in our original write-up, we noted was a was elected in 2010 after he made the campaign promise to “make Obama’s life a living hell”, but instead seems to have only enacted that promise upon the people of Maine. When he’s not threatening to blow up local newspapers or call in airstrikes against them, he’s meeting with a society of 9/11 Truthers and joked about hanging Democratic members of the state legislature. This is a man so heartless that he’s advocated for child labor laws to be changed so children as young as twelve can be put into the workforce, and so insane he once warned that microwaving plastics could result in hormonal changes in children increasing their estrogen levels and making them grow little beards (really). LePage has also told the heads of the local NAACP they could “kiss his butt”, referred to the IRS as “the new Gestapo”, and accused the Majority Leader of the Maine State Senate of “giving it to the people without providing Vaseline”.
And, in bour second profile on Paul LePage again proved interesting, as he provided us with new things to talk about like trying to illegally quarantine a nurse who returned from Africa after helping stop the Ebola Virus outbreak there, and then turned around to blame illegal immigrants for spreading HIV, Hepatitis C, and tuberculosis without any foundation in reality, at all. LePage then made a promise to “veto everything that crosses his desk” and wasn’t joking, vetoing 100 bills consecutively, if they did not have veto-proof majorities without any consideration for their content. At the end of that streak, LePage hosted the media at a press conference with a squeaky toy of a pig, and standing in front of a Christmas tree, promising to veto hundreds of things in the state budget passed by the Maine state legislature. The legislature, in turn, passed the budget with a veto-proof majority, so he couldn’t do a thing about it, except continue embarrassing himself. Which, his bold “veto everything” stance became even more hilarious when LePage forgot how vetoing bills works, and left for vacation without properly vetoing 65 that were hitting his desk that he had said he would block the Democratic legislature from passing. The catch was, he only had a certain number of days to veto them, and after the deadline passed, all 65 laws went into effect. Governor LePage also visited a local school, saying he’d like to shoot a newspaper’s editorial cartoonist. He told the joke… to the cartoonist’s father. Oh, and there was all the talk of Paul LePage getting impeached, after he threatened to cut funding to a school in the state because they had offered a high-paying job to a political rival of LePage’s, House Speaker Mark Eves. When a reporter, Paul Merrill asked LePage about it, he was actually stupid enough to brag about it. Even many Maine Republicans were participating in impeachment talk, after that. LePage even took the time to write a petty letter back to a constituent who asked him to resign in July, and told her “all of Southern Maine is corrupt”(yes, half the state) and “not going to happen”. Three weeks later, he just offered to leave office if enough people wrote to ask him to, and claimed that only four people had asked him to.
Paul LePage continued to be one of the craziest, if not THE craziest governor in the United States and in our third update, we had to bring up moments like how he tried to illegally block the relocation of Syrian refugees into his state by the federal government, laying on plenty of Islamophobic fear-mongering, even invoking 9/11 as his reasons against it, and warning that immigrants from there could bring “hepatitis C, tuberculosis, AIDS, HIV” and “the ziki fly” (which isn’t actually a real insect). LePage also got really racist while trying to play up fears of drug dealers, warning of “guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” who wouldn’t just come to sell heroin, but “half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave.“ (After a few days, he admitted that he was referring to African Americans, but that it wasn’t harmful because Maine is “95 per cent white”.) LePage’s rhetoric about drug dealers at least stopped being racist, but no less insane, as he called for public executions for drug dealers. By guillotine! Well, that and he advised the citizens of Maine to help combat the drug trade by becoming gun-toting vigilantes and to “Load up and get rid of the drug dealers.” Paul LePage also endorsed Donald Trump for president, and started questioning whether or not Sen. Ted Cruz was eligible to be president (making him a Birther, two-fold). LePage even botched an attempt to humanize himself, effectively “cutting in line” at an adoption center ahead of the general public to adopt a dog a day rather than leave it for its intended adopter, a sexual assault victim who had been waiting for the day the dog could be adopted to take in as an emotional support dog. The shelter admitted it broke its own rules for LePage (and considering his history of holding petty grudges when he doesn’t get his way, it’s sort of easy to understand why). LePage also refused to support keeping the drug naloxone readily available in hospitals and emergency services to treat overdoses, by citing an example of a high school student who had overdosed on three separate occasions with naloxone only to keep on using drugs to prove it doesn’t help do anything but allow addicts to continue using drugs, undeterred. Over the course of the next few weeks, after the school said he made up the story of the student, and yet he continued to insist it had happened. State officials soon also came forward to contradict LePage, and prove he made it up, and LePage never could name the mystery student addicted to heroin who came back from the dead three times.
And of course, the few years, we have not seen Gov. LePage calm down much:
- August 25th, 2016: After the Democratic National Convention, Gold Star parent Khzir Khan was outspoken in criticizing Donald Trump for his bigotry, and Trump embarrassed himself by slandering the Khan family, with some of his surrogates even attacking their deceased son, Humayyan. Almost a month later… Paul LePage decided to be one of the elected Republicans to get on the bandwagon, calling Khzir Khan a “con-artist”.
- August 26th, 2016: A day after attacking a Gold Star parent, Gov. LePage leaves a voice mail for a Democratic lawmaker, calling him a “c***sucker” in an unhinged voice mail to respond to claims that he is a racist. And then, at the end of the phone call, LePage gives him permission to make the insane rant public.
- October 11th, 2016: Gov. LePage calls on Donald Trump to use “authoritarian power”, because it’s a good idea to say that to a proto-fascist.
- January 17th, 2017: Paul LePage responds to Civil Rights Hero and Congressman John Lewis’ criticisms of Donald Trump by telling him to thank “Abraham Lincoln, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Ulysses S. Grant” for furthering racial equality. (Lewis, through a spokesman, politely asked LePage to check his history.)
- July 6th, 2017: Paul LePage admits to lying to the press in interviews, saying he deliberately “feed them fake news”.
- August 9th, 2017: Gov. LePage threatens to raise the voting age in Maine to 21. Because… I guess he knows teens hate him?
- August 17th, 2017: LePage becomes the latest Republican to run to the defense of Confederate monuments, in spite of his state being the farthest in the continental U.S. from the Mason-Dixon line, comparing their removal to… what else? Removing a 9/11 Victims Memorial.
- June 12th, 2018: LePage says he “probably” would not certify the primary results in Maine’s 2018 elections, because he didn’t feel the new primary rules that were voted upon on a ballot measure by his own citizens were “constitutional”. The courts, of course, had already ruled that they were.
Paul LePage has survived as governor only because the process of impeachment in Maine is designed to be nigh-impossible to pull off outside of flagrant criminal activity. He’ll be gone due to term limits in a few months’ time, and it can’t come soon enough.