D'Amboise Disavows Fave Radio Crazy

In his pursuit of Olympia Snowe’s Senate seat, Tea Partier Scott D’Amboise is seeking as much media attention as possible.  One outlet that has given him considerable airtime, four interviews in the last year, is the Monticello, ME-based “Aroostook Watchmen” radio show.

Steve Martin, host of “Aroostook Watchmen”, has used his show to address a number of unusual issues, ranging from “Keeping Globalism Out Of America” to stopping the "emerging Mormon Caliphate" (5/12/2011).  Martin’s website for the Aroostook Watchmen is titled www.nofda.com.

Here are a few examples of Martin’s worldview:

On the 9/11 terrorist attacks:  The official story is a “fairy tale,” perpetrated by “the obvious winners of 9/11: the globalists, people who want to form a world government.” (3/15/2011)  “Al-Qaeda is a CIA creation.” (11/1/2010)

On Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:  “He’s going to be on the ark when the flood comes.  He’s a bought and paid for new world order stooge, just like the ones at the U.N., just like the ones inside the beltway.  And he definitely knows.  You don’t get that high without knowing.” (10/4/2010)

On Aroostook Watchmen’s role in the media:  “Really the point that we’re trying to make with this program is that there truly is a cosmic struggle between good and evil and we’re merely pointing out to you how that struggle is playing out locally and in America.  The conspiracy that is seeking to bring down this nation, because it was the only nation founded on Christian values, through and through, is the Devil’s conspiracy.” (12/15/2010)

Steve Martin is easily one of the most erratic hosts on the airwaves, and he has become a more relevant figure of late because of the frequency with which he has interviewed an aspiring United States Senator.

In an interview with FrumForum, D’Amboise tried to downplay his association with the radical host.  “He’s an interesting fellow, but it has also helped me to answer questions that other people may have,” adding, "I don’t agree with a lot of his philosophies."

D’Amboise defended his frequent appearances on Aroostook Watchmen. When asked why has been on the radio show four times, D’Amboise responded, "it’s just to get my name out there" and that he hadn't been on in "four or five months" (his most recent interview was on February 1st, 2011). D'Amboise said, “If they are going to give me some free airtime, I’m going to take it.”

But while he is indeed careful to escape endorsing the most provocative of Martin’s assertions (D’Amboise disavowed Martin’s 9/11 theories to FrumForum), D’Amboise never fails to lend an encouraging “yeah” or “right” to Martin’s tirades. He is also remarkably adept at entertaining Martin’s rants as segues to his own talking points.

Take this exchange from July 8th of last year:

Martin: Anybody that’s been in the Senate this long, who has been there and presided over the deindustrialization of America and the shipping of most our manufacturing base to Mexico and China and isn’t standing on the Senate floor screaming about it, to me, that’s treason.

D’Amboise:  Exactly, it is treason.  You know, we need term limits tremendously, federal term limits.

Or this one from the same day:

Martin: Right now, of course, everything’s mandatory and you have all of this false pursuit of people for political reasons.  You have the IRS ‘siced’ on people for political reasons.

D’Amboise: Right.

Martin:  We could talk about our good friend Eric Hoven who went to jail because he was so good at exposing the fallacies of the evolutionists.

D’Amboise: Right.

And again on October 15th of last year:

Martin: Well, the vice chairman who served with him, a guy named Kaufman, has now come out as a queer and joined the Democrats, so that should tell you something about where the Republican Party has been recently.

D’Amboise: Exactly, exactly.

Later in the same show, D’Amboise expresses regret at the state of geopolitical affairs:

Martin: I’ve had people like best-selling author John Perkins come on the show here recently telling me that there’s probably only, Scott, 6,000 total in the so-called Anglo-American elite and they call the shots for the other 6 billion people on the planet.

D’Amboise:  They do, they do.  And it’s sad that we’ve allowed it to get to that situation.

Sometimes though, D’Amboise contributes his own theories to the Aroostook Watchmen arsenal.  When asked which specific federal departments he would eliminate, he replied by inventing a few of his own.  “Well, I’d eliminate the Healthcare Department and the Retirement-Pension Department because those things fall on the states,” he said. (7/8/2010)

But D’Amboise most surprising comment on Martin’s show was not as farfetched as it was politically dangerous.  On October 15, 2010, Scott D’Amboise let slip one of the most risky policy positions any candidate for public office can endorse: “I’d like to see all of the entitlements go away.”  As of the posting of this article, D’Amboise had not responded to requests for clarification of this comment.

Update: D'Amboise had told FrumForum what he would do about entitlements in his first interview with Nicole Glass. We apologize for the oversight:

On the show, you said you’d like to see all entitlements “go away”. Do you stand by that and does that include Medicare?

I do. But on the Medicare and Social Security: I don’t want to see them go away as in the fact of just doing away with them. There are better ways that we can handle and take care of that. The entitlements that we have and the entitlements I’m talking about are the entitlements that elected officials get. Those entitlements of lifelong salary after they’re done and lifelong health insurance. You know, things like these. Those entitlements need to stop. The entitlements that we have as a government – Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid – they need to be done in a different way, and how we do that is by changing the whole tax code. If we change the tax code to a flat tax or a consumption tax, that way everyone pays their fair share of taxes. There will be enough money for these programs to take care of the people who need it. I think that we’ve gone way overboard with this entitlement program. Unfortunately, Social Security has been viewed as a way of retirement. It was never set up to be that way. And unfortunately the American public has fallen into that belief that Social Security is their retirement fund. But that’s what it’s not there for.