Remember when Maine's senior senator, Susan Collins, said she wouldn't vote for Señor Trumpanzee? It may see like months ago but it was just a couple weeks. At the time, I noted that she had endorsed, raised money for and campaigned with Maine's erratic far right governor, Paul LePage... twice. The clip from Rachel Maddow's Friday show opening (above) gives the background of the latest LePage outrage, starting with his crackpot and threatening call to state Rep. Drew Gattine's answer machine and his follow-up insane statements on WMTW-TV about dueling him and shooting him between the eyes.Maine's state Senate president, Michael Thibodeau (R), who is up for re-election in November, begged LePage to apologize, an idea LePaul scoffed at. LePage: "I am enormously angry... I’m not shying away from what I called him (a cocksucker)."Unlike Thibodeau, Sarah Gideon, the assistant majority leader of Maine’s House, was not calling for LePage to apologize. Like many Mainers, she thinks he should step down as governor-- or be removed. "We strongly and regretfully feel that he is unfit to serve as governor of the state of Maine right now." LePage actually offered to resign if Gattine agrees to do the same. What the hell has happened to Maine?Let's go back to just before Susan Collins wrote her editorial declaring she wouldn't vote for Señor Trumpanzee-- the short August 4th interview Trumpanzee did with the Press Herald before he stepped onto the stage in Portland and tried to drum up racial animosity against Maine's peaceful Somali population. The reporter asked him if he planned to offer LePage, who will be termed out in 2018, a cabinet position. Trumpanzee: "I’ll tell you what. I don’t know that he would want that but he is a very talented guy, he is also a great person, a tremendous person and if he were available I would certainly find something for Paul because he’s done a great job up here, he’s not only popular, he’s done an unbelievable job so I would certainly say that he would be a candidate."Saturday morning NYTimes reporter Trip Gabriel tweeted that "Trump has withheld his taxes and medical records. But his tweets are a pretty good X-ray of his mind," which recalled Hillary's Reno speech quoting Maya Angelou, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." One doesn't need to be Sherlock Holmes to see who and what Paul LePage and Donald J. Trumpanzee are. They both come from the same Know Nothing strain of one of the ugliest aspects of American politics, a strain that has been rejected tim and again by the majority of American people and will be rejected again in November. The video below, of LePage speaking to reporters, leaves nothing to the imagination. The man is a racist rabble-rouser who should be run out of town on a rail. "You shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy. And the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority right now coming in are people of color or people of Hispanic origin. I can’t help that. I just can’t help it. Those are the facts."UPDATE: Maine Warns AmericaBeen there, done that is what the Portland Press Herald OpEd barred this morning, predicting the same kind of dysfunction nationally if Trump is elected that their state is going through for having elected right-wing crackpot Paul LePage
People whose hearts are racing over Donald Trump might want to take a close look at Maine. We got caught up in all this politics-as-entertainment stuff with Paul LePage. We had all the “blunt talk” and “tell-it-like-it-is” strutting, too. The loud insults, the fragile control-freak ego and the “my-way-or-the-highway” approach to governing.It’s turned out to be a disaster. We’re now the slowest-growing state in the country. The governor has somehow managed to attack and enrage everyone, including within his own party.He hasn’t been able to get anything of importance done for ages. And he’s now reduced to collecting signatures on street corners so he can use citizen referendums-- which are supposed to be for citizens-- to govern.Maine can provide a great service to the country right now by letting everyone know how this fun-filled adventure of electing loud, insulting, mean-spirited, anti-government guys turns out.Not that Trump and LePage are identical. Trump is a billionaire with a squirrel on his head, tail forward. LePage is not. But they are eerily similar in other ways.• They both hate the government they want to run.• They both are convinced that they know everything.• They both employ insults gleefully, carelessly and indiscriminately.• Neither seems to have much understanding of the powers that a chief executive has-- and doesn’t have-- in a democracy and under our state and federal constitutions.• They both regularly confuse opinions and right-wing talk radio chatter with facts....All we can say to America is this: Come to Maine. See what happened to us. We’re the slowest-growing state in America. Our government is consumed with melodrama. We’re in gridlock. And we have a governor who can’t govern.