August 31, 2021 12:48 PM UTC

Lauren Boebert's Mountain of Baggage Finally Going National

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• by: Colorado Pols

Salon’s Zachary Petrizzo shines a national spotlight on one of the many troubling stories that locals have been exchanging about freshman GOP controversy magnet Rep. Lauren Boebert of Rifle, Colorado for years now–the 2004 conviction of Rep. Boebert’s spouse Jayson Boebert on charges of public indecency and lewd exposure stemming from an incident at a bowling alley involving underage girls:

Jayson Steven Boebert, the husband of Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., has complicated his wife’s political career recently, after reports that the right-wing congresswoman failed to disclose Jayson’s highly-paid work in the natural gas industry while she was serving on the House Natural Resources Committee, which directly oversees regulation of that business.

It appears that might not be the only thing about Jayson that Rep. Boebert doesn’t want the public to know. In January 2004, when Jayson Boebert was 24, he was arrested for exposing himself to two young women at a Colorado bowling alley. His future wife Lauren Roberts (as she was then known), who was 17 at the time, was also present and was told she was no longer welcome at the bowling alley.

Jayson Boebert pled guilty to “public indecency and lewd exposure” after that incident, according to The New York Post, and was sentenced to four days in jail with a subsequent two years on probation…

It’s a faithful retelling of the story our readers know, right down to the joke about Jayson’s six-inch…thumb:

When Garfield County sheriff’s deputies arrived, McCown told them that he had repeatedly asked Jayson Boebert to leave the bowling alley but that Boebert had “refused to leave and became belligerent.” Boebert told deputies he had not exposed his penis, but had stuck his thumb through the fly of his pants as a prank. Trisha Walies disputed that in her account, writing: “I know that wasn’t a thumb because thumbs aren’t 6 inches long.” [Pols emphasis] Lauren Roberts told deputies she had not seen Jayson Boebert expose himself.

Because local audiences here in Colorado are already quite familiar with the Boeberts’ lengthy sordid history, the question for us for some time has been just how long Lauren Boebert, with all of her own baggage, can keep blasting away at Democrats on matters of personal misconduct before somebody with an even larger audience that Boebert’s social media following points it out. In her brief time in the public spotlight, Rep. Boebert has refined a Donald Trump-style strategy of leaning into her scandals–engaging in such obviously hypocritical fingerpointing that it can have the effect of confounding her critics with respect to Boebert’s own record.

But just like with Trump, it’s only a matter of time before this audacious ploy stops working. Boebert knows all of this information is in the public record waiting to be “resurfaced.” The more national media looks into Boebert’s background, the more eye-popping hypocrisy they’re going to find.

Trying to out-clamor one’s shady past is a fundamentally bad idea. It’s a positive feedback loop of disgrace.

Lauren Boebert seems to be proving this before our eyes.