September 25, 2020 10:27 AM UTC

"Q*Bert" Crosses Up Her Talking Points

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• by: Colorado Pols

Lauren “Q*Bert” Boebert, the Republican candidate for Congress in CO-3, is very comfortable in the role of right-wing provocateur. Boebert has the Fox News shtick figured out, and she knows her talking points…but she doesn’t quite seem to understand how those talking points are supposed to fit together.

Boebert was a guest on Fox Business this morning. We know this because Boebert Tweeted out a segment of her interview:

My opponent should be disqualified from this race given her job-killing stance on energy in Colorado. pic.twitter.com/CZnecFizaN

— Lauren Boebert for Congress (R-CO3) (@laurenboebert) September 25, 2020

Boebert is obviously pleased with her interview since she is eagerly promoting the content. But there are a couple of “record scratch” moments in this two-minute clip that make Boebert seem like a foreign language student who has memorized many of her vocabulary words but still hasn’t figured out how to fit them into a sentence correctly.

Necesito hacer popó. Donde está la bibiloteca?

For example, Boebert bashes her opponent (Democrat Diane Mitsch Bush) for being a “socialist” and wanting to “bankrupt the country” with The Green New Deal. Boebert actually says that she is not opposed to renewable energy in general, but she gets a bit lost in trying to make her point about energy independence:

“We cannot be energy independent with only renewables, and especially when we are outsourcing to China, to Africa, where we know that they often use child and slave labor.”

Say what, now?

Our best guess here is that Boebert is referring to a talking point that State Sen. Vicki Marble has used before — that the lithium mined for batteries needed for electric cars comes from child labor in Africa (or something). If that is not what Boebert is trying to reference, then we’ve got nothing else to help you here.

Boebert babbles on:

“We have the world’s cleanest coal, right here in Colorado.”

Boebert seems to understand the clean coal process about as well as President Trump, who likes to talk about “clean coal” as though it is a shinier piece of rock. As FactCheck.org wrote in November 2018:

In his rallies, President Donald Trump repeatedly talks about “clean coal,” using the phrase more than a dozen times over the past three months. He also has said in other appearances that clean coal can be exported or “loaded up” on railway cars.

But “clean coal” refers to technologies deployed at power plants that make coal cleaner to burn, not to the fuel itself. Modern definitions require cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, and the only way to do that in a substantial way is through carbon capture. Just two coal power plants in the world use the technique, and it makes up less than 0.1 percent of American coal-fired capacity.

Speaking of things that are “clean,” Boebert then moves along to natural gas and the Jordan Cove Pipeline project:

“Our clean liquid natural gas could be sold to countries all across the world, and get them out of the grips of tyrannical, communist leaders. We can free other countries.”

Purchasing natural gas from the United States = freedom?

We assume the basic gist of this statement is that people might be able to break free from dictatorships if they had access to cheaper sources of energy, which…maybe?

As we’ve written before in this space, it’s fine to support Boebert as long as you understand that there are a LOT of policy issues that Boebert does not seem to understand herself.