Asshole of the Month: Lauren Boebert

Colorado, a formerly purple state, has been shifting to the left in recent years, even beating California and other blue states to the punch in legalizing recreational marijuana in 2012. But head westward from the green Rocky Mountain highs around Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins, and you’ll find the legal pot dispensaries drying up, like the landscape, and the political climate shifting to red and brain-dead.

Case in point: Head west on I-70, and you’ll run into the little town of Rifle, population just over 10,000, home to Congress’s lead rightwing nutcase, Republican Representative Lauren Boebert. Boebert owned the Shooters Grill there from 2013 to 2022, a restaurant befitting a town named after a gun, where employees were encouraged to pack heat on their hips.

Boebert is proof positive that “elected politician,” if actually a profession, is one with almost no qualifications beyond a talent for bamboozling an ignorant electorate with bullshit. You don’t even need a decent education or resumé for the job. In fact, Lauren dropped out of high school and only got her GED in 2020, about a month before her first election primary.

Her record is shoddy at best. In 2015 Boebert was arrested for making a public disturbance at a music festival. Then, in 2017, at least 80 people were poisoned with her tainted pork sliders at the Rifle Rodeo, held at the Garfield County fairgrounds. She hadn’t bothered to acquire the proper permits, and her staff was not properly handling food. During the COVID pandemic, she refused to close Shooters Grill despite cease and desist orders from Garfield County, forcing officials to suspend her food license. It’s clear that Boebert has zero respect for public safety regulations: That’s governmental overreach!