Please explain Lauren Boebert

At least she seems to have barely eked out a win in her last election and there are good signs she won’t survive the next election.

Of course, who will she be replaced with? Given conservatives I am not convinced they will improve.

I feel like they’re probably totally ok with all the MAGA nonsense, but not ok with the outright dumbassery like this.

I mean, it’s one thing to espouse a dumb-ass political position that’s popular among your constituents, and another to be an embarrassing dumbass independent of your political positions.

Boebert is riding that line for all she’s worth, with frequent excursions onto the personal dumbass side.

I forecast that she’ll likely get primaried by an equally MAGA, but less idiotic Republican in 2024.

If they just go back to someone closer to the person she previously ousted, it would be an improvement.

He was no prize but at least he wasn’t a national embarrassment either.

This is true. He didn’t buy any ads, didn’t put out any mailers, didn’t have any sort of social media engagement. He basically didn’t really put out any real effort in the primary because he thought it was a foregone conclusion, and was completely wrong about that.

I expect she will be primaried for going woke.
Hypothetical MAGA challenger: “we all know what kind of people sing showtunes” hint, hint

These days, people (many voters) enjoy a reality show featuring a clown who does whacky things. This is therefore what they vote for. She amuses them. Gets her name in the news. Sometimes pisses off people they don’t like.

That’s what passes for politicians these days. Get used to it, it’s only going to get worse.

She parrots right wing talking points and it’s likely a lot of men find her physically attractive. Really, you need only to be able to sing from the right hymnal to please MAGA world.

Lauren Boebert is kinda how I figured out how unhinged my mother had become. She’s always been crazy, but the political weirdness happened after she moved from Michigan to rural Colorado with her new husband, who is a motor cyclist and I guess they know people who are in motorcycle gangs if you want to get the gist of the kind of people she’s been hanging around with. I once actually went there and she took me to her friends’ house and the guy had a “man cave” and I walked in and this man was seriously upset that I, a woman, violated his sacred man cave space.)

She called me up one day shortly after Jan 6th insurrection and started going on and on about how I might see her on the news because she was protesting about her local representative. I think the locals were trying to oust Boebert somehow after Jan. 6th. She didn’t use Boebert by name, but she kept going on and on about gun rights and how Boebert was innocent until proven guilty (I assume was a reference to her tweeting Pelosi’s location on Jan. 6th) and how the representatives were just doing the right thing on Jan 6th by calling into question “very real concerns” about voting security (as if they weren’t trying to block an election, they were “just asking questions” in her mind.) Anyway all of this came without context. She didn’t tell me who she was talking about or what events she was referring to. Just one long obscure political rant.

Then she started ranting about Kamala Harris and how it’s wrong for her to support prostitution (what?)

Anyway after I got off the phone I googled her local rep and sure enough, my mother voted for Lauren Boebert, and apparently defended her honor during a protest.

My mother is aggressively pro life because she thinks every woman should have to suffer like she did, and she’s aggressively pro-gun for no apparent reason that I can discern, so I guess all you have to be is a woman, pro-life and pro-gun for crazy conservative white women to protest for you. My mother believes she is a moderate because she watches C-SPAN. I think she used to be a moderate but now she is delusional. I know I’m not alone in having friends or relatives just nosedive into political extremism. Well, this is who they vote for.

To add another layer of weirdness to her backstory, she had a modeling profile on a website that brought us other crazies like Fartin’ Rudy Guiliani’s expert witness Mellissa Carone. Evidently Ted Cruz discovered Bobert and made the biggest donations to her campaign.

https://www.politicalflare.com/2021/09/it-appears-rep-lauren-boebert-had-an-explore-talent-modeling-actor-page-and-yikes/

Another Colorado Resident, and being in Colorado Springs, an area that has quite an overlap with the sorts that support this person. First, I agree wholeheartedly with the above quote - here in the realm of Focus on the Family ( :nauseated_face: ) it’s literally just about being on the side of the Godly, or the side of EEEEEVIIILLL. [ insert Church Lady meme here if you like ]

And with quoted gambit’s success, the Republican party has increasingly adopted the Good/Evil Us/Them black and white option for the nation. You don’t disagree with God after all (Well, speaking as a Secular Jew, of COURSE you do, but…)! And what’s worse, IMHO, is that increasingly the Religious Right has steadily dropped any actual religious tenets in their pursuit of defining their political power.

By those standards, Boebert is perfect: she’s one of THEM, not the educated, culturally literate elites. A gun-toting, woman of God who won’t compromise with evil. Thus, in Modern America, you don’t care about good government, or your own self interest, as long as your side, the “good” side wins. With a near-evangelical belief that once the Good guys win, everything will be fixed! After all, all the problems are the other sides fault - never yours or those of the others on the side.

TL;DR - Boebert is just a symptom of the dysfunction in the Republican party once they learned that they didn’t have to ACCOMPLISH anything (or that accomplishing things makes things harder as they learned with abortion) - just saying no loudly is enough for their crowd to vote for them with literal religious fervor.

3 universal truths to remember:

  1. In our polarized media climate, you’re unlikely to see flattering coverage of public figures you oppose unless you actively seek it out. We gravitate to our own media, who shows the worst extreme of the opposite faction.
  2. Being an actor-type or public performer is good enough, if you can nail the type of performance the audience desires.
  3. Perception on the national stage can matter more than perception by locals who really know the person, warts and all.

The first time I saw Boebert, I knew little about her, so I had no set expectations. I happened to see a YouTube clip of her playing to a friendly crowd with fairly tame content. She was cute, she worked the room, made eye contact. She was self-deprecating in the way that GED graduates need to be. She nailed the delivery cadence of a lighthearted church brunch, in the same way that Trump nailed the cadence of a Las Vegas insult comic roasting the front row. If you’re in her tribe, she’s quite likeable.

The content doesn’t matter at all. Even the presentation matters little. What really matters to the audience is that they’re being catered to, that someone cares enough to get on stage and at least attempt to perform the kind of softshoe/passion play that signals the virtues they want to promote. Piety, respect of tradition, defiance toward The Other. Delivered in a familiar style that connotes that These Things Are Important - the nightmare amalgamation of MLM pitch, church retreat, grind-culture inspirational seminar, bulk-rate YouTube influencer, the various registers that code as reverent to white middle-class strivers.

Boebert is a moron, like Trump, but she has an instinctive feel for the performance, and no compunction about putting it on and hamming it up. She’s not just a ham, she’s Our Ham. That’s the explanation of Lauren Boebert.

Nice!

So you’re saying these folks vote for Euphonious polemic? :grin:

Nice! 2 points for you

If she’s oustedshe will probably be replaced with a Democrat. She won her 2022 primary by a 2 to 1 margin so she we undoubtedly be the Repulican nominee in 2024, its the general election that was close. So if she’s replaced it will almost certainly an improvement, at least for the next two years.

A year is a long time in politics.

It’ll be interesting to see how the rather rock-ribbed good people around Pueblo react to her being a total wasto in frequent trouble with the Law. A fact many of them probably did not know and do not much appreciate.

If this hoopla does wound her, and convert her into a corrupted fatcat citified person, not a gen-u-ine salt-of-the-earth rural Colorado person, is there anyone else in the Colorado R party who might choose to take a run at her primary? These folks are generally good at smelling blood in the water and turning on each other once they’re bleeding.

Is that what we’re calling Fox News these days?

Thank you for that cogent explanation of the absurd.

I’m guessing she was drunk (and, yes, vaping weed - in my experience, tobacco vapes are bigger and clunkier. Weed vapes are skinny, like pens, and like what she used. They are also ubiquitous in Denver)

See, I head that this was just a baseless rumor arising from a picture that merely looked like her. Is it for real?

You might be thinking of this:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/25/politics/fact-check-super-pac-lauren-boebert-escort-abortion-sugar-daddy/index.html

That was a case of mistaken identity with an escort site. The ExploreTalent web site, on the other hand, is a place where you post a resume so that you have something to point to when trying to audition for a modeling or acting gig. As far as I can tell, that profile seems legitimate. (It’s still there but a lot of things have been redacted, like personal info and photos.) In it she says she’s 24, so it would have been posted in 2010, a decade before her political career started. The web site has been around since 2003.

Honestly, I don’t see anything nefarious about it. If someone is trying to connect the dots for some kind of conspiracy, I don’t understand what it is. It’s like trying to say that because these different people are on LinkedIn then there is some kind of conspiracy.

This is what I was going to say. It’s not much more than that. Owning the libs is the only check-box on Conservative voters’ sticky note of requirements of a political candidate. It does not matter what one does, or what one says - if they can own the libs (or be perceived to do so) then they are alright as a candidate. If it comes down to more than one, then whomever is perceived to own the libs best is the winner.

IIRC, that particular disgrace is still married to a different male than the grooee. Party of family values and Christianity indeed!