Apparently, the recent proposal to jail drug traffickers for a minimum of four years wasn't quite draconian enough for LePage, as he told WMOV, "We could have public executions and we could even have, you know, we could even have [guessing] which hole it falls in." No further explanation was offered for that last part, but in the context, it would seem he was referring to executed an person's decapitated head.
LePage also called the ACLU the "worst organization in the State of Maine" for protecting the press and others who criticized him extensively this month for a rather astonishing comment made during a town hall meeting, which spoke volumes on his sudden call for a medieval death penalty:
"Now the traffickers . . . these 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."Though LePage insisted his words were distorted by the media and his comment was just a "slip-up," the governor obviously maintains stereotypical views about who drug dealers might be — forgetting that the War on Drugs has made criminals of those who might only be attempting to help people treat any number of ills.
In an attempt to apologize and backtrack on the town hall comment, LePage insisted he "should have said Maine women" instead of white women, because "Maine is essentially all white" — but that mental slip occurred because "my brain was slower than my mouth." Perhaps he was telling the truth, considering recent Census Bureau statistics show the state is 95 percent caucasian, as HuffPost pointed out.
Comment: What he was actually doing was playing on the mostly unconscious and irrational fears of many white people; a development we are also seeing be played out all across Europe with the refugee crises...
Still, though such seemingly audacious statements might be explained away, advocating not just the death penalty, but the re-introduction of the guillotine for those who make transactions the State considers illegal is akin to how U.S. ally Saudi Arabia handles its criminals. In fact, the Saudi government has been caught red-handed dealing the very drugs for which it kills its citizens. Since the U.S. government is an infamous drug-pusher as well, how would LePage handle guilty State parties? Or, as the severely stratified criminal justice system evidences, would they be immune to this barbaric death? It's doubtful.
If Governor LePage doesn't get his draconian wish for the guillotine, he still offered another solution to handle dealers, since a four-year mandatory sentence simply isn't "good enough." He avidly stated, "We gotta go to 20 years. We gotta keep 'em here until they die."
Comment: Never mind that the incarceration rate for drug offenses has already spiraled way out of control and solved nothing, and never mind that the entire 'war on drugs' is a sham for reasons too many to enumerate here, it is individuals like Maine Governor Paul LePage who may ultimately be the most dangerous to the fabric of society that we have to be on the watch for.
This is the same guy who sought to remove a mural in the state Department of Labor building depicting the history of the labor movement. He is one of the pathocrats; a political animal and pathological fascist who is not only hopelessly out of touch with the average person and the issues that they are faced with, but spreads ideas that are mostly punitive in nature and do nothing to uplift the people he is sworn to serve.