May 20, 2021 12:55 PM UTC

Botching The Talking Point With Lauren Boebert

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• by: Colorado Pols

Our friends at Right Wing Watch bring us the latest example of freshman Rep. Lauren Boebert doing the thing she does best, which is making stuff up on friendly right-wing media forums who would never think of fact-checking her in real time. Boebert appeared yesterday on the “prime time” streaming channel of far-right personality “Dr.” Gina Loudon:

“I’m really enjoying telling Speaker Pelosi to, ‘Kiss my mask,’” Boebert chortled. “[Rep.] Thomas Massie and I both got warnings, and both of our letters ended up in the same exact place ironically: the trash. Leftists won’t even listen to the bureaucrats at the CDC, and it just goes to show that this party’s ‘Follow the Science’ slogan is a total joke, just like this entire administration, just like the entire Democrat Party. They want to tell you to listen to science and listen to data and facts, but they haven’t done that for more than a year. Two weeks to slow the spread turned into communism really, really quickly.”

“Texas removed their mask mandate two months ago, and Sleepy Joe called it ‘Neanderthal thinking,’” she continued. “No, sir. Republicans are just following the science, and since removing the mask mandate two months ago, Texas has not reported a single COVID death. Not one.” [Pols emphasis]

As you can probably guess without looking up the numbers, this statement is absolute nonsense. Since the repeal of Texas’ statewide mask mandate on March 2 of this year, over 3,400 Texans have died from COVID-19. At this point we have no expectation that Boebert will acknowledge this grievous error, let alone apologize to the families of thousands of Texans whose deaths due to COVID-19 she just erased. But it’s another display of Boebert’s belligerent ignorance having real-world consequences. Boebert doesn’t just get the facts wrong, she makes a bloody ass of herself posturing on this falsehood–while endangering her colleagues by acting out her own misinformation.

With all of this in mind, and in eminent fairness, we think Boebert may have simply mangled beyond recognition a talking point supplied to her by the right-wing Daily Caller the day before her interview with Gina Loudon:

It has been 66 days since Beto tweeted that Gov. Abbot is killing Texans and the state reported zero deaths from covid-19 yesterday https://t.co/z3m5oNDnpN

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) May 18, 2021

Who reported that for one day this week, there were no COVID deaths in Texas. Which yes, is an isolated data point of good news. It’s possible that the “yesterday” part of this message was lost in translation between the Daily Caller’s Tweet and Boebert’s regurgitation a day later. Either way, Boebert is seizing on a mistaken assumption to justify her boorish, dangerous behavior.

As Rush Limbaugh (peace be upon him) famously observed, “words mean things.”

When words stop meaning things, people like Lauren Boebert get elected.