February 10, 2023 02:37 PM UTC

Lauren Boebert Goes Back To The Circus

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• by: Colorado Pols

While Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene arrived at this week’s State of the Union address wearing a bulky white Chinese balloon-style costume and loudly heckled President Joe Biden throughout the event, Greene’s rival and fellow sophomore outrage condenser Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado made her biggest splash on Twitter with the following now-infamous but as-yet undeleted moment of ludicrousness:

We expect our astute readers to instantly recognize that this accusation is false, since it was governors and not presidents who made the decision to close schools during the early vaccineless phases of the COVID-19 pandemic–and that doesn’t matter anyway, since Donald Trump was President of the United States when the schools closed, not Joe Biden. Boebert wasn’t just a little bit wrong in this case, and her mindless poo-flinging betrayed a much deeper ignorance than even most Democrats would have presumed.

After barely surviving a re-election campaign she was supposed to win easily and promising afterward to “turn down the temperature” after two years as one of the most visible, least productive members of Congress, since returning to Congress in January Rep. Boebert has shown no sign whatsoever of changing course. Boebert’s calamitous stand against now-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy resulted in MTG severing any remaining public pretense of friendship. But as the Independent’s John Bowden reports, that didn’t stop the two from making themselves the “Q-some Twosome” stars of this week’s hearing of the House Oversight Committee, devoted to uncovering alleged censorship at Twitter before Elon Musk took over:

Reps Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert fumed about supposed shadow bans and censorship of conservatives, which Twitter executives have long denied ever occurred. Ms Greene, in particular, was so incensed that she ranted about how she would not let Twitter’s former head of safety, Yoel Roth, respond to her questions (thereby making it unclear why a hearing was necessary at all)…

Ms Boebert…used her question time to harrangue Mr Roth about whether he personally authorised the “shadowbanning” of her account, @LaurenBoebert; Mr Roth repeatedly stated that he did not, though Ms Boebert would insist otherwise while growing visibly emotional and claiming that “Twitter staff” had informed her “last night” that he had done so.

All in all, it was a chaotic mess that exemplified the tumultuous start of the 118th Congress, which took more than a dozen tries to elect a Speaker of the House and was widely mocked this week in the media and online after Ms Greene and others caused disruptions during the president’s State of the Union address.

After which Boebert more or less went off the deep end of nuttery:

So everyone’s clear, the “poll” Boebert is misquoting is a joke–and as for Boebert’s suggestion that Wednedsay’s Twitter issues were a conspiracy, Musk has had enough problems keeping the lights on that we’d hesitate to go there without very good evidence.

At this point, it doesn’t matter if MTG and Boebert are friends or blood rivals. The competition between these two bombastic figures to occupy the outer limits of the far right of the Republican Party is just another factor preventing Boebert from “turning down the temperature,” not that she would be inclined anyway. Whether it’s Boebert’s messianic conviction about her election to Congress or a simple inability to recognize self-injurious behavior, Boebert is freshly proving her inability to become less of a risk in a district Republicans shouldn’t have to worry about.

From county party turmoil to the halls of Congress, chaos reigns in today’s GOP.

In Colorado, Boebert remains the face at the top of the pile.