March 21, 2015
By Mike Tipping
Republican state Sen. Michael Willette’s (click here) statement on the floor of the Maine Senate last week in reference to his bigoted Facebook posts wasn’t exactly the most fulsome apology. He expressed contrition only for “several criticisms of the president,” declining to elaborate on them but admitting that they were “completely inappropriate.”
I guess that’s technically an accurate description of what he wrote, but it doesn’t really express the full insanity of his posts, which attacked President Obama in racial terms, claimed he was in league with Islamic terrorists and accused him of actively plotting a violent seizure of power.
In his floor speech, Willette did not apologize at all for his attacks on Muslim Americans, who, he claimed in his posts, are universally deceitful and are trying to overthrow the United States from the inside, adding that if he had his way, he would “round them up and air drop them back into the rubble and hell holes from whence they came.”
The paucity and insincerity of Willette’s apology didn’t become fully clear to me, however, until I started getting calls and emails from some of his remaining Facebook friends. They told me – and then provided screenshots to prove it – that he has actually been liking posts and making new comments defending his previous statements, even after saying he was sorry for them....
