Tag Archives: Lauren Boebert

Will We Ever Be Delivered from the Plague of Unserious People?

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Lauren Boebert groped 'Beetlejuice' date in heavy-petting session before getting tossed out

The current betting line is that this next Republican-driven government shut down, the one likely to begin at midnight on the 30th, will last three weeks. That anyway is what I’m picking up from the smart kids in the know.

But … those kids have no idea what it will take to actually end it. The fundamental problem being that the — take your pick here — “Clown Caucus”, “idiots”, “MAGA dead-enders” leading the revolt simply don’t care what damage they wreak. Put another way, they aren’t really serious about spending, (all this cynical/moron-level grandstanding is over 1.9% of the federal budget). We all know that what it’s really about is the value to their personal fund-raising, which only increases the longer their tantrum.

The “serious” business has been lodged in my brain lately thanks to the now infamous Lauren Boebert vaping/heavy petting session at that Denver theater and a fascinating story in the UK’s Daily Mail about South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, often touted as “veep” material for a second Trump term.

Because it was both comically salacious and her hypocrisy/lying was validated by the videotape, we all know about Boebert, the epically nitwit Congressperson/former escort (or maybe not) from western Colorado. But the Noem story has received far less traction, possibly because The Daily Mail, Britain’s highest circulation paper, doesn’t exactly compare with the New York Times in terms of, you know, journalistic credibility.

Still … with your gimlet eyes at full focus, I encourage you to read what the Mail dug up on Noem, who, keep in mind, is the sitting governor of an American state, albeit “Prairie ‘Bama” as I’m obliged to call it.

The very short version is this: Noem is still carrying on a not particularly down low affair with ex-Trump “advisor” Corey Lewandowski. That’d be one thing I couldn’t give a damn about, other than the usual rich irony that she’s still selling herself — successfully — to rock-ribbed Prairie ‘Bama Republicans as a model mother and wife.

Governor Kristi Noem, “God-Fearing” Family Woman, and Corey Lewandowski, Trump Creep, Reportedly Had “Yearslong” Affair | Vanity Fair

But, as the story strongly suggests, the amount of time and state money she’s spending on far flung adventures to burnish her, mmm, conservative bona fides and get regularly advised by Lewandowski, is kind of, well, scandalous, not that anyone over there seems to care all that much.

Noem of course is very much modeling her governing after the likes of Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Tim Pawlenty here in Minnesota, two dudes who thought nothing of contorting their management obligations to, first and foremost, advancing their laughable presidential ambitions. Although in Walker and Pawlenty’s defense their cynical manipulation of state government never approached ignoring a deadly pandemic that at one point in November 2020 had Noem’s Live Free or Die fiefdom #1 in the world in terms of deaths per capita. (But hey, most of those were Indians and migrant workers at slaughterhouses.)

By contrast to all this manifest unseriousness, and the Matt Gaetz-Marjorie Taylor Greene clown caucus about to grind the gears of the country to a halt … again … (by now this is a Republican tradition), it’s worth a moment to compare all of that crew’s self-serving chaos to a very little noticed event hosted by MAGA bete noir, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, aka AOC.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells climate marchers to be 'too big and too radical to ignore' – as it happened | Climate crisis | The Guardian

While Boebert was checking her date for pocket change and Noem was racking up frequent flyer perks with Lewandowski, AOC, one of the most frightening figures on the landscape to the MAGA echo chamber was leading a thousands-strong awareness/protest march in New York City against fossil fuels and for green energy. Green energy! The horror! The stuff that you don’t choke on at stoplights behind that 7000 pound Duramax diesel. Pollution-free, job-creating renewable energy being an idea that Boebert/Noem/Gaetz/Greene Unserious Subcaucus rails against nearly as much as … as … well, I don’t know, as … books in libraries.

Lauren Boebert, Far-Right Firebrand, Wins Re-election After Recount - The New York Times
Kristi Noem's on a Political Rocket Ship. But Don't Rule Out a Crash. - POLITICO

The contrast couldn’t be more stark. Yet one crew has the ability to bring government to dead stop … again … while the other, AOC, is treated like a Bond villain by the MAGA intellectuals on the set of “Fox & friends.”

I apologize for not having a solution to the existence of nitwits and charlatans like Boebert, Noem, etc. All I’ve got is the same question I — and perhaps you — have asked for years now, namely, “What do voters see in these people? What do they imagine politicians like this will or are doing for them? How are their lives better with the likes of Lauren Boebert in charge?” I mean, beyond, “sticking it to the libs?”

Personally, I return to brain science and ask what structure or gland or cluster of neurons is so excited by the sight of MAGA-speaking women in tight dresses and/or tight jeans … and can it be treated with drugs? Perhaps even via vape pen?

Low Expectations and Dark Hopes for the New Year

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The arrival of a new year always brings a heightened level of giddiness, accelerated by blind hope and a largely fact-free belief that things will be better this time around. It’s part of the stories we tell ourselves to get out of bed in the morning and … go out and do exactly the same things we’ve done every previous year.

For Catholics it’s a bit like the “confessional effect” where we go in and tell the priest all the miserable things we’ve done, said or thought, get exonerated and set free in the wild to start all over again.

That said, on this the third day of the new year I’m enjoying my coffee and watching the D.C. press horde scurrying after the Capitol’s new power brokers … Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and, um, Kevin McCarthy. They are the center of attention. Because they are now, for the moment at least, the critical characters in the present (and future) Congressional drama. Put another way good friends, the United States really is reduced to caring what Lauren Boebert has to say about … anything.

No one knows how this election for Speaker of the House will play out, but what is abundantly clear is that the delusional mass psychosis that is Trumpism has not yet been expelled from the Republican party. It’s at least one more cycle of defeat and chaos from exhaustion.

The great natural cycle of rebirth has delivered the same mutant baby. For this moment and likely for the next two years, MAGA narcissism and all the dysfunction and corruption that it engenders will have it’s hands around the throat of the House of Representatives.

But — and here comes the “hope” part — all this chaos points to where 2023 could likely take the Grand Old Party.

For all the accusations people of my ilk hurl at conservatives for their nihilism, their willingness to torch the whole damn ranch in pursuit of some undefined “total victory”, a nihilistic denouement is clearly where “the crazies” are going in this McCarthy/Speaker fiasco.

Related and more significant in the realm of gross nihilism, their intellectual leader, the Orange Former Guy, holed up in Mar a Lago has been hinting broadly that if professional Republicans don’t stop blaming him for the election disaster of last November and being nicer to him, he’ll run as an independent in 2024.

I see a lot of Trumpian logic in that.

Being notoriously lazy and undisciplined, Trump has to regard a campaign free of all the bureaucratic exertions, rules and formalities of a party nomination as immensely appealing. Money wouldn’t be a problem. Hell, he grifted a quarter of a billion off his MAGA congregation for a bogus legal defense fund. If he confined himself to occasional airport rallies, daily Truth Social videos, and all the free airtime Newsmax and Mike Lindell TV will feed to his forever fervent, deeply retrograde “base” he’d easily match the return all that icky, sweaty, expensive hand-shaking people like Mike Pence would have to do to get 1/100 the attention.

Of course Trump couldn’t win election to the White House. But his (currently) assured support from even 20% of Republican voters would seriously confound the strategies of other candidates, to the point they, like McCarthy with his “crazies”, would have to offer him undigestible, self-defeating concessions to preclude him from attacking them. He’d “win” by maki ng them lose. In other words, a narcissistic nihilist’s fever dream.

So, my apologies for the semi-bummer here so early in this new year. But irrational exuberance just ain’t my thing.

Fauci, Mengele and Plastic

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Yeah … a new picture.

I don’t know about you, but I wake up every morning — grab a cup of coffee, walk the dog — and register amazement at just how many things I could rant about, how many things are so deeply crazy I could spend all day dabbing at the foam around the corners of my mouth and bemoaning the barely Cro-Magnon state of some of the world.

I mean, here’s a quick re-hash of the past month:

A Republican Congressman shunned by his own family for being a vile idiot posts an anime of himself stabbing a congressional colleague in the neck.

A Republican congresswoman is caught — twice — telling (and gilding) a likely entirely bogus story of her confronting a congressional colleague as “a terrorist sympathizer.”

A former “60 Minutes” correspondent, long since dismissed for fabricating a story about the Benghazi incident pops up on FoxNews — where she is currently employed — comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to Joseph Mengele.

And here in Minnesota, St. Paul cops, allegedly hired to protect the public, are playing the Joe Rogan/Tucker Carlson “personal choice” card in the context of refusing to vaccinate themselves — to avoid spreading a contagious, deadly disease to that same public, i.e. the people who employ them and pay their salaries.

I mean … it just goes on and on … . Where do you start, if you choose to start at all? Sadly, like many people I talk to these days, the post-Trump moment, this interregnum we’re in, isn’t providing the necessary respite from the exhaustion of the Orange God King’s constant vulgar grifting. People want to forget about all the stupidity, racism, fraud and shame and “get back to normal.” Except that “normal”, when Christmas shopping, football and “The Bachelorette” could fully consume our attention, keeps back-drifting off toward the horizon.

Which explains why I just want to say something about … plastic.

Yesterday, there was this story in The Washington Post, reporting on a long-in-development congressional survey of plastic consumption/production.

“The United States contributes more to this deluge than any other nation, according to the analysis, generating about 287 pounds of plastics per person. Overall, the United States produced 42 million metric tons of plastic waste in 2016 — almost twice as much as China, and more than the entire European Union combined.”

TWICE AS MUCH AS … CHINA.

Since I became deeply obsessed with plastic a couple years ago, and I began regularly filling a (plastic) bag with all the plastic wrappings we accumulate every day, I haven’t stopped being amazed at the beach ball-sized glob of plastic waste the two of us here at La Casa Lambert accumulate in a given week.

And worse, I’ve become convinced that our recycling efforts are largely illusory. (“Plastics accounted for 12 percent of the 292 million tons of municipal solid waste generated in the U.S. in 2018, totaling some 35.7 million tons. However, the volume of plastic waste recycled in the U.S. that year was 3.1 million tons, giving a recycling rate of just 8.7 percent. Nov 22, 2021.”)

Probably once a week I stroll through Costco — one of the more enlightened major retailers — and stare at water, bottled in plastic, swaddled by the case in another layer of plastic and then wrapped together on shipping pallets in yet another layer of plastic.

Water.

Here’s a petition you can sign to tell Costco they can do a lot better than they’re doing in terms of wrapping everything they sell — from water to bananas to socket wrenches — in plastic. (Usually I doubt any big company will give this a second thought. But Costco has demonstrated a heightened interest in civic-minded retailing in the past.)

Among the crazy, socialist ideas for weaning ourselves off plastic — 287 pounds per American, per year! — is … buying less. How about fixing or restoring what you already have? (It’s insanity, I know.) Screw keeping up with the fashion of the minute. Use what you’ve already got. Instead of complaining about how Biden has clogged up the ports so bad you can’t get all that plastic/plastic-wrapped Chinese Christmas crap out off ships floating outside LA and Long Beach.

Anyway, before I take a deep breath and plunge back in to the flaming sewer hole of conservative America, where a conscientious scientist is compared to a Nazi mass murderer because … he wants to stop a pandemic that has already killed 750,000 Americans … I had to cough up the plastic twine ball logged in my throat.