Anyone would be better than Rep. Lauren Boebert
I’ve tried to give U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert a little bit of grace. She’s a mother, like me. Underqualified for her job, like me. And well, who from the Western Slope hasn’t made questionable decisions at Country Jam. Perhaps, I thought, she would rise to the occasion of representing the 3rd Congressional District in Congress.
She has not.
If Boebert cared half as much about her community and the people who live there as I do, she’d be using her megaphone to encourage people to get a vaccine for COVID-19 instead of spreading false rumors and ramping up fear of the federal government.
Heck, I’d even settle for quiet
about the vaccine. Instead, we get a callous indifference to the health of her constituents.
“Biden has deployed his Needle Nazis to Mesa County,” Boebert tweeted last week in response to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sending scientists to study the Delta variant’s spread in a community with low vaccine rates. “The people of my district are more than smart enough to make their own decisions about the experimental vaccine and don’t need coercion by federal agents. Did I wake up in Communist China?”
Boebert got one thing right in that Tweet. The people on the Western Slope of Colorado are some of the smartest, most caring, folks I know – the list includes a whole lot of people I love.
However, when I stopped people outside the downtown Grand Junction post office two weeks ago – a few days before Boebert’s Tweet – I found a shocking amount of vaccine misinformation. Only 40% of eligible people in Mesa County are vaccinated.
One woman equated getting the vaccine to attempting suicide. There have been 5,343 deaths reported following COVID vaccines to the CDC. Only a handful of those deaths were actually caused by the vaccine according to the CDC’S inquiries. But even if all of the reported deaths were caused by the vaccine, the rate of death would be .0017% because more than 300 million people in the U.S. have received at least one COVID vaccine dose. Those odds are significantly better than the high rate of suicide in Mesa Coununcertainty ty, better than the outcomes of COVID-19 and the dangers of driving on the highway.
The woman then told me she was more worried about immigrants bringing smallpox to her community than she was about the Delta variant. Smallpox was eradicated in the U.S. in 1949 and globally in 1980. The virus now exists only in research labs, two of them to be exact.
I also interviewed many wellinformed people. Some had chosen not to be vaccinated because they were simply unsure of its safety. Boebert would do well to tell these people what she actually knows about the safety of the vaccine instead of leaving her supporters to assume Boebert fears the vaccine is a deadly communist or fascist plot.
I am not unsympathetic to folks who have fears about vaccines. Two of the vaccines use a new technology that didn’t go through full FDA vetting before it received emergency approval, and the other vaccine has caused a handful of people to lose all their platelets and suffer life-threatening blood clots. The medical community is capable of making grave mistakes when it comes to administering medicine that does more harm than good.
I’m vaccinated and most of my loved ones are. None of us had severe side effects. I will get my
children vaccinated when it is approved for those under the age of 12. I’m not a communist or a Nazi. I considered the information and decided the safer option was to get vaccinated.
Boebert doesn’t like giving people information to make their own decisions. She likes obfuscating the truth for her own political gain at the expense of those who believe her. Listen to her speech on the floor of the U.S. House moments before a riotous mob stormed the Capitol to stop the counting of Electoral College votes. Boebert tried to walk a line between Rudy Giuliani’s crazy assertion of a vast election conspiracy and Sen.
Mitt Romney’s sane position that our election security could be better.
Her half-truths uttered moments before the U.S. Capitol was stormed, along with the outright lies told by others at a rally a few hours before, ruined people’s lives. People who trusted Trump and made bad decisions now face serious legal trouble, and Boebert didn’t help any of them by pretending, like she is with vaccines, that a vast conspiracy was afoot. People who trust Boebert will forego the vaccine and some will suffer fatal or debilitating COVID-19 illnesses.
Some of that trust comes from Boebert’s remarkable charisma on the campaign trail.
Edward Dutton, who owned a book store in downtown Grand Junction for 14 years before he sold, moved away for some time, and then came back, said he thinks Boebert is doing a “hell of a job” because of “the fact that she stands up and tells people exactly the way it is.”
Dutton, who doesn’t ever get the flu vaccine but did get the COVID vaccine after researching it, said he likes that Boebert stands up for the Second Amendment. Like many of the people I spoke to, Dutton’s top concerns for Mesa County were affordable housing and unbearable traffic. There are many people who would defend the Second Amendment and also address the needs of a community struggling.
Dutton, who kindly granted me a long, thoughtful interview while standing in the stifling desert heat, is now on my list of folks who would be better in Congress than Boebert. It’s a long, long list.
But here are a few possible candidates I’d like to see get the Republican nod in the 2022 primary. State Sen. Don Coram, grew up on a ranch in Montrose and is honest as the day is long. Sen. Bob Rankin is a fiscal genius from Carbondale whose wife serves on the Colorado Board of Education. The outgoing president of Colorado Mesa University, Tim Foster, has proven himself loyal to the district and more than capable of bringing home the bacon for a community overlooked for decades. Mesa County Commissioner Janet Rowland was once feared too liberal by GOP operatives given that she once ran CASA in Mesa County. She is smart and fair but most definitely not liberal.
However, part of Boebert’s appeal is that she is anti-establishment. She unseated an incumbent. I honestly don’t think former President George W. Bush could win a Republican primary in the 3rd Congressional District right now. State Sen. Ray Scott lost his bid for county commissioner to a political newcomer. What we need is a rebel who will fight the man, stand up for the little man in the West, and … promote a healthy democracy and a healthy community.