For all of Rep. Lauren Boebert’s attention-grabbing antics in her first days in Congress, it looks as if she is still having to play catchup if her ambition is to be the leading U.S. House crazy. It must be driving her nuts.
No matter what she does, Boebert can’t possibly keep up with the rabid stylings of Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — another new member, now being anointed as MTG — whose long list of crimes against common decency seems endless.
New videos and Facebook posts spring up by the day, including the post about, uh, Jewish space lasers, which has necessarily gone viral. Let’s just say it involves the deadly California wildfires of 2018, the Rothschilds, lasers from space and the, uh, coincidence that the fires were set along the route of then Gov. Jerry Brown’s California High-Speed Rail project. This has led to a gold mine for late-night comics and, of course, to the Twitter posting of Mel Brooks’ Jews in Space.
Brooks was funnier, but he couldn’t match Greene for either weirdness or for winking anti-Semitism. No wonder Donald Trump thinks so highly of her. And no wonder Boebert can’t keep up. Greene was a right-wing commentator — the kind that makes Sean Hannity sound like Bernie Sanders — before she was elected to Congress last November. There’s just so much on the record because she put it there while Boebert was busy loading up on guns for her wait staff at Shooters Grill.
So, sure, we’ve seen those Coloradans demanding that Boebert resign as representative of Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District. But one Democratic House member is seeking a vote to expel Greene, who is a proud QAnon follower while Boebert is what they now call QAnon curious. In the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection, that suddenly seems a lot more serious than it did in November.
Another of the recently revealed videos showed Greene, back in 2019, before she was in Congress, stalking Parkland gun-safety activist David Hogg on the streets of Washington and screaming, among other things, that he was a “coward” for not talking to her and was being paid to lobby for Red Flag laws by, wink, George Soros. As you probably know, Hogg attended Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School at the time of the deadly massacre there, in which 17 were killed.
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This is the same Greene who has called school shootings like the one in Parkland “false flags” on now-deleted Facebook posts. And the same Greene whom House Republicans have nevertheless rewarded with a place on the Education and Labor Committee. Yes, they did. I’m guessing they’ll give her Homeland Security next.
Why not? In yet another deleted post, Greene wrote, “I am told that Nancy Pelosi tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that ‘we need another school shooting’ in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control.”
That was before she “liked” a Facebook comment saying the quick way to get rid of Nancy Pelosi was “a bullet to the head.”
When House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was apprised of what he called “disturbing” tweets, he said he would have a talk with Greene. We’re waiting. Meanwhile, McCarthy took a trip to Mar-a-Lago to visit one of Greene’s biggest boosters who, in a moment of sanity, McCarthy said “bears responsibility” for the assault on Congress. That would be Donald Trump, and McCarthy would be the one walking that back, now saying “everybody across the country” bears some responsibility. Um, I’m pretty sure I don’t bear responsibility. How about you?
In any case, he was able to walk away from Mar-a-Lago with Trump’s assurance that he’ll help McCarthy’s attempt to retake the House in 2022, although Trump seems busier trying to unseat Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, one of 10 Republicans who voted for his impeachment. Matt Gaetz, another rival in House craziness, traveled to Wyoming to campaign against Cheney. He was joined via telephone by Don Jr. It’s on, all right.
If you have had any doubts about the staying power of Trump and Trumpism in the Republican Party, they should now be put to rest. You saw that only five Republican senators stood up to Trump on a vote as to whether a Senate impeachment trial for a former president is constitutional. Mitch McConnell, who has been hoping to reduce Trump’s hold on the party by also noting Trump’s responsibility in the insurrection, voted with the 45 pro-Trumpers. For those keeping score, that’s another walk-back as it appears increasingly likely that the Senate will never hold Trump accountable for the direct attack on American democracy from the pro-Trump mob he incited.
But you can see Boebert’s problem, can’t you? Yes, she tweeted about Pelosi leaving the House chamber during the Jan. 6 insurrection. I’m not convinced that was a signal to anyone, but you can see why someone might think so. It’s clear from photos and video that she doesn’t mind hanging out with right-wing militia types, including some at the Capitol that day.
And, yes, she had gotten a lot of press for wanting to bring her Glock to the House floor while ignoring the magnetometers that members have been asked to walk though. And so we heard the aforementioned Pelosi say, in answering a question about the temporary protective fencing placed around the Capitol, that the “enemy is within the House of Representatives.”
Asked what she meant by “the enemy is within,” the speaker said, “It means that we have members of Congress who want to bring guns on the floor and have threatened violence on other members of Congress.”
The guns-on-the-floor commentary is aimed at Boebert and a few others. The violence on members, though, is solid Greene.
Boebert tried to latch onto the video of Greene’s stalking of David Hogg — just as many have noticed that she borrowed from Ted Cruz’s Tweet on the Paris climate agreement. Cruz tweeted that Joe Biden cared more about “the views of the citizens of Paris than in the jobs of the citizens of Pittsburgh.” Boebert followed with her “I work for the people of Pueblo, not the people of Paris.” Neither makes sense since the Paris climate accord is no more about Paris than the Versailles Treaty was about Versailles.
And so, jumping on the Greene video, Boebert got into a Twitter fight with Hogg, who had tweeted that the Capitol fencing would do nothing to deter people like Greene and Boebert. To which Boebert replied: “David, please. We all saw how tough you were when questioned face to face. Give your keyboard a rest, child.”
In post-Columbine Colorado, the general rule is that you don’t slam survivors of school shootings, but it’s apparently not a hard and fast rule. In fact, I’m pretty sure you can expect Boebert to double down on it and triple down and, well, did you hear that Ken Buck is saying he won’t run against Michael Bennet for his Senate seat in 2022, which leaves the Republicans with no obvious challenger?
It’s nuts, of course, almost as nutty as Jewish lasers, but somebody has to do it. And a Boebert run would attract tremendous attention — I can actually visualize it — and could possibly (if not very plausibly) lead to her being the top crazy in the Senate. I mean, who’d have thought she’d have ever made the grade as a contender in the House?
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow.
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