LePage said during a town hall meeting that drug dealers with the names “D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” come to ME from New York City and CT, sell their drugs and then “half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave”.
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That doesn’t mean LePage is backing down from the stance he’s taken on race, namely that he believes black and Hispanic people are especially responsible for the opioid epidemic, and that it’s important for him to say so repeatedly. I want you to record this and make it public because I am after you.
LePage’s second and final term as governor officially ends in 2019.
“I’m looking at all options”, LePage said on talk radio station WVOM.
“I think some things I’ve been asked to do are beyond my ability”, he said, noting the mounting pressure he had received from fellow Maine politicians in recent days.
He says he’s going to meet with family and close advisers to decide what to do next. He followed up his comments by saying, “When you go to war, if you know the enemy, the enemy dresses in red and you dress in blue, you shoot at red, don’t you?”
He seemed to toy with the idea of stepping down as governor, saying if he has lost his ability to convince ME residents he’s the right person for the job then “maybe it is the time to move on”. The governor acknowledged that he left the voicemail and professed a desire to settle the dispute with Gattine in an armed duel. Drew Gattine, for the voicemail where the governor casually asserted last week that Gattine was a “son-of-a-bitch socialist cocksucker”. “It’s unacceptable. It’s totally my fault”, LePage said. “It just absolutely knocked me off my feet”.
“Regarding rumors of resignation, to paraphrase Mark Twain: ‘The reports of my political demise are greatly exaggerated, ‘” he wrote. This isn’t the first time Governor LePage has caused outrage.
Fredette says LePage is addressing his behavior himself, and that lawmakers must discuss more pressing issues ahead of the November election. The governor asked for forgiveness from ME people for his actions and said he would be taking steps to correct his behavior.
LePage apologized to Rep. Gattine’s family and said he would call the representative Tuesday morning to try to set up a meeting with him. “I think we should move on and do the people’s business”.
“Where are we today versus six years ago when the unemployment rate was at 8.4 percent and today it’s down below 4 percent and we are having conversations about we don’t have enough workers in the state of ME to fill these jobs”, Fredette said. Not surprisingly, the incident quickly prompted calls for LePage to resign.
Some called his comments racially charged. The tirade stemmed from LePage thinking that Gattine called him a racist.
These are arguments that liberals in ME have been making for years, but it appears as though conservatives have finally reached their breaking point following LePage’s attack on State Rep. “I want to meet with Mr. Gattine and then I want to meet with my team at my office and we’re going to look at what the proper steps are to move the state forward”.
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LePage later apologized for his choice of words.
