It already didn’t look great for Lauren Boebert when she got kicked out of a Denver theater for being disruptive during a performance of the Beetlejuice musical — or when video emerged of the voluble Republican congresswoman being escorted out of the theater. But that was hardly the end of this saga. A second video showed Boebert vaping in front of a pregnant woman, who claimed that the lawmaker refused to stop doing so when asked. The story really went nuclear when a third surveillance video leaked, showing that Boebert and her date were getting awfully comfortable with each other during the show.
Unfortunately for Boebert’s campaign to rebrand as a normal lawmaker, more juicy details keep coming out. Boebert — who has condemned drag shows in the past — was co-groping at Beetlejuice with an Aspen bar owner whose establishment hosts drag shows and participates in an event called Aspen Gay Ski Week. “I learned to check party affiliations before you go on a date,” Boebert told TMZ, although the pair have been reportedly seeing each other for months now.
In an interview with OAN, Boebert, who has been arrested four times, said that she is “very known for having an animated personality.” But the private incident in public is having a big impact on her professional life, distracting from her effort to impeach President Biden. Days after the incident, she was removed from the list of speakers for the Texas Youth Summit later this month.
At least she has her defenders. In a long Facebook post published Monday, Boebert’s ex-husband, Jayson, said he shared the blame for the incident, claiming that his acts of cheating “broke her down.” While it’s odd to have your recent ex-husband come to your defense for getting handsy in public, Jayson Boebert is something of an expert in this realm, having once been arrested for exposing himself to a teenager at a bowling alley.
Democrats would be screaming for a resignation, and they would get it. Appalling the GOP skates over shit like this, with zero shame.
I’m sure she’s getting a solid talking to, behind closed doors.
See: Al Franken
Republicans operate on a very strict internal “no accountability” model. A “whataboutism” isn’t just a defense to the outsider it is a thought terminating measure to the party member. They are trained when approached with fault to immediately and thoughtlessly dismiss it and turn around and point at some form of impropriety elsewhere. Their presidential candidate has provably done any number of things - at this point criminal and immoral - but a lot of them defend him by saying that they don’t care if it’s true because they would still vote for him even if it was.
The left ( the Democrats to a far lesser degree) however is accountability hungry. If one of their own is prone to gross hypocrisy most people will turn on them like a pack of wolves and work to fully contextualize it to determine exactly how much “fuck that guy” should be applied. Did they apologize? Do they understand what they did and have it properly explained ? Did they mean it? Did they try to defend themselves for the indefensible or did they properly take their lumps ? Is the mistake such that a genuine promise to do better is enough that further consequences should be applied or does this damage this person’s character so much that they can never be trusted again?
The different mindsets are irreconcilable to each other. Republicans can’t generally understand the nature of the leftist distain for the Democrats as “the party with a more tolerable tab of lukewarm behaviour that will be voted for in absence of an actual paragon”. But they recognize it as a weakness that they can exploit.