Is This What Got the Boeberts Brawling In Public?

Back in the day before Humphrey Bogart found true love with the lovely 19-year-old Lauren Bacall, he was involved in a marriage with a woman he called “Sluggy” and collectively they were known as the Brawling Bogarts. They would go down to his boat, Santana, get drunk and fists would fly. In 2024 we have the Brawling Boeberts, who are not nearly as interesting people. No, they’re two pretty tacky people, dull in fact, who met when he was a 29-year-old construction worker and she a 15-year-old high school dropout flipping burgers in a fast food restaurant.

Fast forward to 2020, when they owned a restaurant, Shooters, in Silt, Colorado. Boebert and the other severs used to wear guns in holsters to wait on the customers, and purportedly they served ptomaine burgers at one point. That was before the apocryphal tale of Lauren meeting Ted Cruz, who played the political Obi-Wan Kenobi to her Luke Skywalker and launched the fiasco that her representation of CO-03 has been for the past two terms.

As you read here earlier today, there was an altercation at Miner’s Claim, the one restaurant left in Silt now that Shooters has shut its doors. Hands were thrown and reportedly the five foot tall Boebert punched her 6’3″ ex husband in the nose — twice. So what in Reagan’s name (we have to evoke some God, right?) caused this fracas? I’m wondering if this article from Politico was used by Jayson to taunt his former wife. It starts out giving the bio of a hardcore Republican voter, Maisy Reid, so hardcore that she has a picture of Joe Biden’s face on her dartboard. She never voted for a Democrat in her life, but by gosh and by golly she voted for Adam Frisch in 2022 because she had had it with Boebert, whom she viewed as a “nonstop provocation machine.”

And that is Bobo’s gift, provocation. Or, her hobby in any event. When she’s not feeling some guy up and being sexually provocative, she is absolutely pissing somebody off. Alas for her, she’s been doing the latter to her constituents and they are through. At least this one gal was.

Reid had supported the Colorado Republican firebrand when Boebert pulled off a 2020 primary election upset. And as an avid Fox News connoisseur, Reid was thrilled the first time she saw her local member of Congress appear on the cable network. But as Boebert’s media hits began to pile up, and her provocative antics consistently made headlines, the novelty soon got old. Reid remembers her exact breaking point — a February 2022 Boebert appearance on Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime.” At a time when Reid was facing personal financial difficulties, her representative seemed focused on something entirely different — mocking Democrats as “Branch Covidians” who were “addicted to masks.”

“I still blame Biden and the Democrats for the skyrocketing costs,” Reid explained, “but I got a weird sort of feeling when Boebert was ranting about masks because, by that point, masks were irrelevant here. What mattered was the cost of gas and food and rent. It seemed she was out of touch.”

In Reid’s view, Boebert was more interested in becoming a far-right pundit and political celebrity than anything else. The pro-gun, MAGA politics that once made Boebert so attractive no longer outweighed the drawbacks of having a member of Congress who seemed addicted to the limelight.

Boebert nearly lost her seat in 2022 because of a legion of alienated voters like Maisy Reid. And despite running in a district that voted for Donald Trump by an eight-point margin in 2020, her fortunes next year were looking even worse. She trailed in the polls, was being carpet-bombed by millions of dollars’ worth of Democratic attack ads and wasn’t even guaranteed to make it out of the Republican primary.

That takes us up to last month, when Boebert did something unexpected, which many found unbelievable. She decided to move from CO-03 to CO-04, from a district that was reliably 7-8 points GOP-favored to one that is 29 points GOP-favored — at least in the days of Ken Buck, which has been the past five terms. Boebert may now do the impossible and jeopardize that seat as well.

In all events, she was set for a primary in CO-03 and she’s absolutely set for one in CO-04. The smart money does not think that switching deck chairs on the Titanic is going to help Boebert, but like many desperate people, she’s doing desperate things. For one thing, Bobo needs to get reelected so that she can get a government pension, which she would qualify for after three terms.

The Capitol has always been a place that attracts members who thirst for notoriety and fly too close to the sun, but even by those standards, Boebert stood out.

She resisted mask and vaccine mandates in the House chamber, earning a $500 fine from the House Ethics Committee. She set off metal detectors at the entrance to the House floor by refusing to part with her sidearm, causing a dispute with Capitol police. She amplified Trump’s baseless election fraud claims, tweeted ‘Today is 1776’ on the day of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and suggested Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who is Muslim, was a terrorist. She expressed hope in the existence of “Q,” the anonymous QAnon figure, and, just two hours after a shooting in Boulder that killed 10, sent a fundraising email opposing gun control measures advocated by “radical liberals” Pelosi and Biden.

And naturally this freak show caught Donald Trump’s attention. How could it not? That’s when Boebert truly became intoxicated with her own publicity. Her self importance metastasized like a raging cancer.

Celebrating her primary election victory in a Grand Junction bar in June 2022, cocooned by a crowd of elated constituents, Boebert was in mid-interview with the local media when her iPhone began to ring. Seeing “POTUS” on the caller ID, her eyes popped. She hastily cut her response short, excused herself from the interview, then hurried to the stage and reclaimed the microphone.

“Mr. President,” she declared triumphantly, raising her phone to the mic, “you are now on speakerphone.”

“You have one of the greatest congresswomen, I think, in history,” the former president told the giddy crowd.

Everything Trump Touches Dies is the operant axiom here. The article goes on to say how before Boebert’s Beetlejuice scandal, there was a field outside of town covered with Lauren Boebert signs. It identified the region as singularly as nearby Mt. Garfield. Now, the field is bare.

It’s a metaphor for Boebert’s precarious standing in Mesa County today, the Republican hub of her congressional district. Mesa powered her primary upset in 2020 and delivered a landslide margin that November, but today it’s more like a seat of resistance. Grand Junction spawned Restore the Balance, a bipartisan nonprofit group aimed at combating political extremism that was created in response to the events of Jan. 6 and Boebert herself. The city’s mayor, Anna Stout — who refers to Boebert as “toxic” — is running in the Democratic primary for Congress. Jeff Hurd, a conservative attorney and former chair of the board of the Grand Junction Area Chamber of Commerce, is in the race on the GOP side.

“We gave the world Lauren Boebert and Tina Peters,” Stout said, referring to the former Mesa County clerk and recorder indicted in a breach of the county’s election system. “We’re not proud of it. And although I don’t speak of this diverse district monolithically, there is an acute sense of being fed up here. We don’t want to be a national laughingstock.”

On the Republican side, Hurd’s campaign makes the same point, though less explicitly. His campaign slogan is “Serious leadership for rural Colorado,” and his bio notes that he is running because the district deserves “someone focused on doing something instead of just being someone.”

She’s run out of gas. I don’t know if Jayson Boebert is even literate enough to keep up on political articles like this one, but I daresay somebody told him about it. And again, I’m just speculating that this was possibly the proximate cause of the fisticuffs they engaged in publicly. Something got Boebert’s ire. Her husband said or did something and the timing of the publication of this story and the incident at Miner’s Claim are close together. Maybe he got hold of it.

Or, maybe there is zero connection between the article and the fight. Nobody needs Politico to tell them that Boebert is up the creek without a paddle, and she put herself there, every day and in every way. She’s an acolyte of the Madison Cawthorn university of Messing Up a Miracle, a college to be found in the School Of Hard Knocks. Like Cawthorn, she parlayed her looks and MAGA talking points into a six-figure income with many benefits and perks. And like Cawthorn, she took all these advantages and squandered them.

The moral of the story is that creatures with tiny brains and enormous bodies, such as the dinosaurs, go extinct. And people with tiny brains and enormous egos do likewise.