Carnes: Who in their right mind …
Oh, Colorado GOP assembly members, what hast thou done?
You had the perfect opportunity to return the party to one of respectability and integrity.
You remember those days, right?
Of course you do, back when you stood for a strong national defense, civil rights, fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets, free trade, free speech, law and order and other such noble endeavors.
Now it’s massive tax cuts for the wealthy, trillion-dollar deficits, gerrymandering, voter purging, Congressional subpoena ignoring, bible-thumping tax-evading evangelicals obsessed with pedophilia and cocaine sex orgies and damning Mickey Mouse while claiming anything they disagree with as fake news.
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But perhaps that’s more of a national perspective.
Last week’s slate of Colorado Republican candidates at the state party assembly seemed to be primarily focused on one single issue as opposed to the myriad of important topics on the minds of Colorado voters, and sadly it was the pointless and futile continued whining about the baseless claims of election fraud.
This, of course, sadly leads one to conclude that the once proud Colorado GOP has allowed itself to be taken hostage by the extreme far right fringe of the party known as Trumplicans.
Although a separate party all to itself, the current GOP has all but stepped aside to let the inmates run the asylum.
(NOTE: While the Democratic Party has its very own fair share of lunatic fringe members on the extreme left, it appears the Colorado version is so far remaining relatively sane and logical when it comes to a party platform for the upcoming midterms).
The proof is in the pudding, as they say (unless it’s a setup for a Bill Cosby joke …), as the top vote tally for the party’s nomination to face Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet in November was State Rep. Ron Hanks, a proud QAnon conspiracy theorist promoter still insisting the 2020 election was stolen and that Antifa and Black Lives Matter agitators were responsible for the deadly insurrection, where he was in attendance on that horrific Jan. 6 day in DC.
But the top prize went to Tina Peters, the Mesa County Clerk currently dealing with a 10-count felony and misdemeanor indictment for her alleged role in the copying of confidential voting data and including an attempt to influence a public servant and criminal impersonation.
Even though leaders of the Colorado GOP asked her to suspend her campaign while under indictment, Peters refused and received the most votes to run for secretary of state against incumbent Jena Griswold, as long as she makes it through the June 28 primary election.
Two election deniers with one under indictment, and both publicly supported by that bastion of credibility, the MyPillow Guy, and that’s the best the Colorado GOP could come up with?
Looks to me like our state’s version of the GOP now regrettably stands for: Generating Only Pariahs.
Hopefully primary voters in June will reverse this embarrassing trend.
Richard Carnes, of Avon, writes weekly. He can be reached at poor@vail.net.