Dumb of the week — extended edition

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Here’s a little tale about a man named Dan. Dan David Foreman III, born Sept. 20, 1953 in the mid-sized town of Lake Forest, Ill. Lake Forest has a population just under 20,000 today; but, back in Dan’s day, it was probably a lot smaller. Kind of a Mayberry place, probably. I don’t know — I’ve never been there. I’m from here.

Well, old Dan — Col. Dan, because he served 30 years in the Air Force — grew up in that town, which is situated in the far-northwestern part of the “Land of Lincoln,” almost 100 years to the date in 1857, when the roads got laid and the plats got platted for the town of his birth. Of course, that was 21 years after the Potawatomi people — who’d lived in that area for untold tens of thousands of years — were pushed out by the U.S. government in 1836, “as part of the Indian Removal of tribes to areas west of the Mississippi River.”

That’s all from Wikipedia. 

Sen. Dan Foreman. File photo.

What Wikipedia doesn’t say on that particular page is that Dan hails from the heartland of one of the most ancient and profoundly important places on this continent. He grew up about 300 miles from the site of Cahokia — a city at the center of what was once among the greatest civilizations to ever exist on Earth. You can still go see the mounds, on the Illinois side of the border with Missouri. I’ve never been there, but I want to go. It’s a long way from here, where I was born, my dad was born and my son was born.

Has Dan been there? I don’t know.

I do know that Dan moved from Illinois at some point after graduating from Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., earning a B.S. degree in business management and administration in 1975. He was a commercial pilot, an “amateur radio operator” and served as a master navigator on KC-135 jet tankers and C-130 cargo planes, including combat duty, which got him his full colonel rank and vice commander role of the 168th refueling wing in Fairbanks, Alaska. Following that, he wound up in the Moscow area, where he was a cop for 11 years. 

He describes himself as a “Christian conservative” and “life member of the NRA,” as well as the  Military Officers Association of America, Potlatch VFW Post and Farm Bureau of Benewah County. He’s been married for 49 years, has  seven children and 22 grandchildren. He is a staunch Catholic.

Amid all those accomplishments, Dan ran a losing campaign for Latah County sheriff, but won a term in the Idaho Senate from 2016-’18 representing District 5 — including parts of Latah and Benewah counties — in a narrow race against Democrat Dan Schmidt, 50.76% to 49.24%, respectively. He held onto that seat in the 2018 Republican primary, but lost in the general election to Democrat David Nelson by a sizable margin — 56.1% to 43.9%. He lost to Nelson again in 2020, with 49.6% of the vote to Nelson’s 50.4%. But he was back as the winner of the 2022 GOP primary and went on to unseat Nelson in the general election for District 6, 50.1% to 48%. That’s why his Idaho Legislature bio lists him as a first-term senator, but he also won the 2024 primary with 52.88% of local Republican votes and will face Democratic candidate Julia Parker in the November election.

That’s sort of why Dan’s in the news this week. Dan, of Lake Forest, Ill., blew up at Democratic Dist. 6 House candidate Trish Carter-Goodheart at a bipartisan candidates’ forum in Kendrick on Oct. 1. When she asked whether racism exists in Idaho, he shouted, “go back where you come from” and, shortly thereafter left the venue.

The trouble is, Carter-Goodheart is more “from” Idaho than pretty much anyone. She’s a member of the Nez Perce Tribe, more properly called the Nimiipuu, or “The People,” which have lived in the region that we call Idaho, Washington, Oregon and Montana for untold millennia. Col. Dan and his Illinois pedigree pales in comparison, no matter how you cut it. He might be able to claim similar lineage in space and time if he went back to his Neanderthal progenitors in Ice Age Europe, and I’m sure they’d all get along just fine.

For her part, Carter-Goodheart was born and raised in Lapwai, where she serves her lifelong community as a fundraiser and grant writer, with a particular focus on children’s health and safety. She’s been on the National Indian Child Welfare Association Board since 2008, and held a seat on the organization’s public policy committee during all that time.

So, to recap: Dan stood on land Carter-Goodheart and her ancestors have inhabited for eons (and which she actively serves) and told her to “go back” there.

Then, to further prove his repugnance, Dan wrote on Facebook: “I enlightened this person [Carter-Goodheart] to the fact I was born in America, and I am therefore a native American. There was no racial slur in my statement.”

The depths of racism, misogyny, lack of self reflection or even awareness — not to say outright contempt — contained in that statement staggers the mind. The only refuge for insight into Dan’s mind may well be the DSM-IV. Particularly the section on dissociative disorders.

I’m not qualified to diagnose anyone, and don’t pretend to, but this isn’t the first time Dan has popped off. He has referred to his own constituency as a “cesspool of liberalism” 

(I get his sour grapes on this one, since barely more than 50% of voters ever actually want him to represent them, and more often than not tell him to take a hike at the polls — which doesn’t make them “liberals,” they’re just reasonable. Unfortunately, there are about 2,500 reliable Dandroids in Latah who want to rule over some kind of retrograde Idaho-cum-Salem, Mass., circa the 17th century). 

He made other headlines in 2018 by reneging on a speaking engagement on birth control and sex education with students at the University of Idaho, but somehow was still on hand to rant “abortion is murder” at them in a campus hallway. That’s how you teach kids about representative government, I guess — lurking in hallways to scream at them.

Indeed, on his Idaho GOP bio page, Dan states that “the top issue for Idaho is to abolish the unnecessary, harmful and wasteful curse of abortion.” Because everything else in Idaho is going so great with the roads and schools and everything, dealing with the “curse of abortion” is the No. 1 priority for the entire state. 

Sure, Dan.

He also promises to “introduce legislation that eliminates the current affirmative defense for having an abortion in accordance with state guidelines. The only exception to the prohibition on abortion is to save the life of the mother.” To be clear: Dan Foreman wants women who are raped and/or the victims of incest to be forced by law to carry those pregnancies to term.

Those are his words, or at least the words of the Idaho GOP. And there’s more: Dan also introduced (shelved) legislation that would make both the mother and the attending physician liable for first-degree murder in the performance of an abortion, unless it was to save the mother’s life. 

Ladies take heed: Your great-grandpa, granddad, dad, brother, uncle, male cousin, son, grandson or great-grandson rapes you, and Dan wants you to carry that baby or else he’ll put you in jail — maybe for life, maybe to the death penalty. Murder 1 is nothing to sniff at. Sit and think about that for a minute.

Oh, and before we forget, he also says climate change is a “scam” and, according to his own Wikipedia page, “does not support the separation of church and state.” So he’s a theocrat to boot. One wonders what Dan’s hot take is on whether the planet is round.

Essentially, in Dan Foreman, we have the ne plus ultra of the Idaho Republican Party’s fundamental derangement, nicely wrapped up in a bald, white Illinois man (and I say this as a balding, white, multi-generational Bonner County man).

And so: I invite Dan to take a hint, and “go back” to where he came from, though to do so would require him to travel not just geographical distances, but gulfs of time.

Sen. Dan Foreman, R-Viola, can be reached by mail at P.O. Box 8254, Moscow, ID, 83843; 208-332-1405 (home); and 208-332-1405 (Statehouse, session only). He serves as vice chair of the Judiciary and Rules, Agricultural Affairs, and Commerce and Human Resources committees.