At the beginning of January, Maine’s governor Paul LePage got into hot water for bringing up race and drugs and sex in the following footage — more or less a snippet of a warped fever dream speech the Republican leader delivered in “The Pine Tree State” town of Bridgton.

He subsequently apologized, and gave a whopper of an explanation for why he said what he said.

This from Gawker:

“I spent an hour and 15 minutes talking to the people in Richmond the other night about some of the problems in Maine,” LePage said Friday. “In that whole time, many of you were there, that whole time, I made one slip-up, I made one word of slip-up. I may have made many slip-ups. I was going impromptu and my brain didn’t catch up to my mouth.”

He, improbably, continued:

“Instead of saying ‘Maine women’ I said ‘white women’ and I’m not going to apologize to the Maine women for that. Because if you go to Maine, you’ll see that we’re essentially 95% white.”

In what’s not entirely surprisingly, LePage couldn’t leave well enough alone in regards to this drug epidemic thread (it started, specifically, pertaining to heroine) and brought up another one of his bright ideas to combat such deadly contraband. He wants to intimidate the criminals. He wants to bully the drug dealers.

With the same kill device the French used to slice off the head of Marie Antoinette.

This from Esquire:

“What I think we ought to do is bring the guillotine back,” he told WVOM. “We could have public executions and have, you know, we could even have (guessing) which hole it falls in.” He said that he was “all in” on fighting drug criminals and said a recent proposal to establish a minimum sentence of four years for drug traffickers was too lenient. “I think the death penalty should be appropriate for people that kill Mainers,” LePage said.

The guillotine as a device for capital punishment was outlawed in France in 1981. The last man guillotined in the country was Hamida Djandoubi on September 10, 1977.

Oh mon Dieu!