Governor Paul LePage receives more national negativity

Maine's Governor Paul LePage sadly continues to bring more negative attention to the beautiful state of Maine.

Washington Post calls for ‘unhinged’ Gov. Paul LePage to resign

Governor Paul LePage continues to bring negative publicity to the beautiful state of Maine

The newspaper says in an editorial that the governor's three-ring binder of drug suspects arrested in Maine has exposed his ‘three-ring circus of unhinged racism and unhinged ravings.’

The Washington Post published an editorial Tuesday night that calls on Maine Gov. Paul LePage to resign because of racially charged statements including his assertion that 90 percent of the people arrested in Maine on heroin dealing charges are black or Hispanic.

Noting the Portland Press Herald’s report Monday that the governor’s own compilation of suspects in a three-ring binder shows that only 40 percent are black or Hispanic, the Post said, “Facts are inconvenient for Mr. LePage, who now appears to have been undone by them.”

The Post's View
Maine’s governor is completely unhinged
Neither LePage nor his staff has explained why it’s important to identify the race of a drug dealer.  In fact, The Post said in its editorial that, “Mr. LePage threatens to remake his state’s image from a vacation paradise of surreal natural beauty to a hotbed of hatred.”

It concludes by saying that in Maine, “Officials of both parties have called on him to resign. It’s high time he does.”

Mr. LePage, who entered office in 2011, refused to attend Martin Luther King Jr. Day events or meet with representatives of the NAACP as one of his first missteps in office. Unfortunately, Governor LePage has a long history of racial animus, and this year 2016, 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.