The original draft of this email was sent to Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler and copied to his editors, the congresswoman who he graded with “three Pinocchios” and her communications director.
Good morning, Glenn,
I carry no water for Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R-CO) nor any other fabulist politician who exaggerates or otherwise takes poetic license when telling “origin stories” and burnishing their images (see Dick Blumenthal’s Vietnam service record, Hillary Clinton’s aircraft taking sniper fire in the Balkans, inter alia).
But I’m struggling to understand how “Rep. Boebert’s origin story about a man beaten to death outside her restaurant” [A4, Mar. 14] is qualitatively different from the stories leftist politicians and their media allies at The Post and elsewhere have been telling every day for many months about George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis and Daniel Prude’s death in Rochester.
Like Anthony Green, the ne’er-do-well meth addict who died near Boebert’s Colorado restaurant in 2013, Messrs. Floyd and Prude were also longtime drug users whose deaths last year had little or nothing to do with violent trauma. The medical examiner reported that the level of fentanyl in Floyd’s bloodstream was about three times the level of a typical overdose death. In Prude’s case, he died in a hospital a full week after his encounter with police, and physical injuries had nothing to do with it. (May both their tortured souls rest in peace.)
Yet you’re eager to give Republican Boebert three Pinocchios, while leaving lying Democrats — mayors, prosecutors, governors, members of Congress, the president, and thousands of “social justice” narrative-spinners in the media — off the hook, even though they’re effectively doing the very same thing you accuse Boebert of doing. They’re pretending that physical violence killed junkies Floyd and Prude when in truth it was their addictions, and the horrible toll those addictions took on their health over time, that killed them. Just like Anthony Green.
Look, I understand that all the “woker beez” in Big Brother Bezos’s maniacal hive are under great pressure to spout the party line. But surely you’re discomfited by the hypocrisy and double standards that such spouting requires. And you must be close enough to a comfortable retirement by now that you can just tell him to buzz off and happily fly away. Save your own tortured soul, my friend, before it’s too late.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.