It could have started anywhere, but you know it just had to start in Aurora, what I’ve long called the best news town in the nation.
On Sept. 19, 2019, Republican Lauren Boebert got her first claim to fame on the steps of Aurora City Hall. After seven long and exquisitely painful years of her promotion to the public eye and Congress, however, it’s finally lights out for the country’s weirdest carpetbagger.
National news outlets this week called Boebert’s 4th Congressional race against Democratic challenger Eileen Laubacher a loss for the three-term wonder.
Bless those most-conservative voters in the state who turned out in the 4th Congressional District to finally right one of Colorado’s most infamous wrongs.
Few American humans in the past few years have shown the astonishing disregard for truth, honesty, compassion, integrity and intelligence as has Boebert. She has rivaled other recent hateful delinquents such as Donald Trump, Steven Miller, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz.
Boebert’s first well-publicized stunt started right here in front of city hall.
Then Texas Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke came to hold a city-hall front porch town hall meeting, using Aurora as a backdrop for how the country needed to change direction to avoid issues like the Aurora Theater Shooting and other ghastly shootings. O’Rourke proposed a mandatory semi-automatic gun buy-back to confront the nation’s plague of gun violence.
Sentinel reporters and photographers came back from the event with a great story, that included some whack job with a loaded Glock strapped to her waist telling O’Rourke he wasn’t coming for her guns.
“Hell no, you’re not,” was Boebert’s first quoted quip, which led to a catalogue of infamous slurs degrading Muslims, gays, immigrants, liberals and much of the rest of humanity.
No one knew then that the visiting nutcase would go home to her restaurant in Rifle, where she and some of her employees wore strap-ons for fun and frills at the Shooters Grill. They served up weirdness slathered in the lack of good sense and an occasional side of food poisoning.
She traded all that for a run at the Western Slope congressional seat — and got it.
Any other time in history, such weirdness among voters would have been especially shocking. Donald Trump, however, was president and that nation was kind of OK with it.
But nearly from Day One, Boebert made an international case for why Colorado voters should never be trusted again.
I’m a journalist and totally get and respect the wide variety of humans and philosophies and opinions and how my job is just to tell it like it is. When “it is” clearly a case of someone with serious psychological and other problems, as a journalist, I would be a liar to just look the other way and act like Boebert is different but OK.
She’s not OK, and it’s not OK to have people like Boebert running anything linked to the government.
It’s not OK to wear a loaded gun for fun and shock value.
It’s not OK to promote Q-Anon disinformation and gaslighting like Boebert did after voters kicked Trump out of the White House in 2020.
“Everything that I’ve heard of (Q-Anon) I hope that this is real because it only means that America is getting stronger and better, and people are returning to conservative values,” Boebert said in reference to the conspiracy theory that a secret army of cannibal pedophiles connected to the movie industry and Democrats was being routed out by fellow Q’s. Their secret savior was Trump.
Not long after, just before Thanksgiving that year, Boebert said she didn’t “believe” in the danger of the COVID pandemic. She called Dr. Anthony Fauci a communist and bragged she was going to have a “peaceful protest” at her home over the death of a turkey.
That was just the beginning.
Boebert offered a seemingly endless supply of crazy, accusing schools of putting litter boxes in classrooms so students identifying as cats could widdle like they were meant to, in cat litter.
She berated “Tic Tacs” after a congressional hearing about “Tik Tok,” and pushed back against paid parental leave, bragging that she gave birth to one of her four children in the front seat of a pickup truck, “because as a mom of four, we got things to do.”
The rest is just a blur.
Boebert said outside a church event that she was “tired of this separation of church and state junk,” saying that “the church” ought to direct government policy rather than the other way around.
She started yelling for the camera a lot. Then she got caught on camera in 2023 at a Broadway production of Beetlejuice in Denver vaping in the theater and rubbing her date’s crotch while he rubbed her breasts.
She got into a few public rows with her now-divorced husband, and when it became apparent that she was totally unelectable in her home district on the West Slope, she moved to Weld County, the strongest Republican stronghold in the state, until this last election.
During a primary debate, an opponent asked Boebert, “Could you give the definition of ‘carpetbagger?’”
Boebert’s modus operandi is based on the false belief that if one talks loudly, everything sounds sensible and profound. Boebert, and much of what’s left of the Republican Party in Congress, are daily proof of that misnomer.
After a few hard blinks and some jaw movements I’ve seen previously in TMJ patients, she stared at particularly nothing and terse-smiled her response while jilting her neck.
“Is this a Mary Poppins question?”
It’s like people finding out that “dumb” has a “b” at the end, as Boebert’s intellectual mentor, Trump, has pointed out.
Thanks, now, to fed-up Republican voters in the 4th Congressional District, this will just become a sidebar in the sad parts of Colorado history.
The happy part is that the post I’ve had pinned to my “X” account since 2021 can now come down.
“#LaurenBoebert is a one-woman musical: “Praise the Lord and Pass the Hamunition” or “Hammy, Get Your Gun.” or “Gats Mart” or “Mrs. Pissed Goes to Warshington” or “The Banned Wagon.”
Now, let’s fix the rest of Congress and the White House.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com