Republican governor Paul LePage is well known for his racist tirades, but he certainly doesn’t like being called out for his comments.
‘I’m After You’
LePage left an expletive-laden rant on Democratic State Representative Drew Gattine’s voice mail on Thursday, in which he told the lawmaker:
“Mr. Gattine, this is Gov. Paul Richard LePage. I would like to talk to you about your comments about my being a racist, you c**ksucker. I want to talk to you. I want you to prove that I’m a racist. I’ve spent my life helping black people and you little son-of-a-bi**h, socialist c**ksucker. You … I need you to, just friggin. I want you to record this and make it public because I am after you. Thank you.”
Well, well, well. “Thank you,” indeed!
According to the Portland Press Herald:
“LePage sent the message Thursday morning after a television reporter appeared to suggest that Democratic Rep. Drew Gattine was among several people who had called the governor a racist, which Gattine later denied.”
Gattine said that he never called the governor a racist, but rather:
“What I said to the television reporter today is that the kind of racially charged comments the governor made are not at all helpful in solving what the real problem is. And that is, we have a crisis in the state of Maine of people overdosing on heroin and prescription drugs and we are not doing enough with respect to treatment and prevention.”
‘I Would Point It Right Between His Eyes’
LePage did not back down from his voice mail later in the day, despite backlash from both sides of the aisle in his state. Instead, he doubled down on his threats when he invited a reporter from the Press Herald to his home, along with a television crew from WMTW. During the interview, LePage stated:
“When a snot-nosed little guy from Westbrook calls me a racist, now I’d like him to come up here because, tell you right now, I wish it were 1825. 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 not be (Alexander) Hamilton. 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.”
Just A Small Part Of Bigger Picture Of Republican Racism
LePage has been under fire for comments he made back in January, when he said:
“Now the traffickers … These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty, these types of guys. They come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, and they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue that we’ve got to deal with down the road. We’re going to make them very severe penalties.”
LePage’s communications director denied that the governor was talking about Black people in particular in his comment. However, the governor himself later said:
“I had to go screaming at the top of my lungs about black dealers coming in and doing the things that they are doing to our state.”
LePage is a huge supporter of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. The Trump/Pence campaign recently hired his daughter, Lauren, as Maine’s coalitions director.
Trump has a long history of racism himself. It shouldn’t be too surprising that many of his supporters have racist tendencies as well.
Featured image courtesy of DonkeyHotey on Flickr, cropped from its original form. Available under a CC Attribution-ShareAlike license.
