Carl Paladino on Tuesday said that he had not intended to send racist remarks about US President Barack Obama and US first lady Michelle Obama, which were roundly denounced as viciously offensive, to a Buffalo newspaper for publication.
Paladino, a former candidate for governor of New York and a political ally of US president-elect Donald Trump, said in a statement that he had meant to e-mail his remarks to friends.
Instead, he said, he inadvertently sent them to Artvoice, a Buffalo weekly, which published them last week.
Photo: AFP
In the statement, Paladino, a western New York builder and a member of the Buffalo Board of Education, said that he would not heed calls for his resignation, “not when it’s time to help implement the real choice elements of Trump’s plan for education reform.”
Paladino’s remarks last week were in response to a survey about next year circulated by Artvoice to figures in the Buffalo community.
Asked what he wanted to see “go away in 2017,” Paladino answered, Michelle Obama: “I’d like her to return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.”
He also wrote that he hoped Barack Obama would die of mad cow disease. His comments were published with those of three dozen other survey respondents.
In a statement, Paladino apologized to the “minority community,” and said he received the survey at an emotional moment, after listening to Obama speak about the humanitarian disaster in Aleppo, Syria, which “resulted from his failed and cowardly foreign policy.”
“I did not mean to send those answers to Artvoice. Not that it makes any difference because what I wrote was inappropriate under any circumstance. I filled out the survey to send to a couple friends and forwarded it to them not realizing that I didn’t hit ‘forward’ I hit ‘reply.’ All men make mistakes,” Paladino added.
In the days since his original comments were published, Paladino’s words have been condemned by a spokeswoman for Trump and by public figures around the state, including New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and the state’s highest ranking education official, Betty Rosa, the chancellor of the Board of Regents.
Local politicians, including the Erie County executive, have called for Paladino’s resignation, and the Buffalo News reported that the Buffalo school board planned a special meeting for Thursday to address “board member conduct.”
After his statement was published by WBEN, a Buffalo radio station, on its Web site, the New York Times contacted Paladino, who said he would send a reporter the statement. Instead, he forwarded what appeared to be part of a different statement.
It picked up in the middle of a thought, and took to task the “pathetic heathens” it said had criticized him, including Cuomo and the president of the Buffalo school board, Barbara Seals Nevergold.
Paladino said that statement was a draft written by his brother-in-law, which he did not intend to send.
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