EDITORIAL: Don't be duped, Mitsch Bush is far in left field
One of the country’s most-watched races for the House of Representatives pits gun-toting Republican Lauren Boebert against far-left Democratic sociology professor Diane Mitsch Bush. Democrats, thinking they can flip Colorado’s Congressional District Three from red to blue, have poured money into the Mitsch Bush campaign.
It means a region of farmers, ranchers and miners could send to Congress a politician so far out in left field she could join the socialist congressional clique known as AOC + Three, the nickname of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., and Michigan’s Democratic Rashida Tlaib.
Either Boebert or Mitsch Bush will represent the Third, a jurisdiction so geographically vast it covers more than one-third of the state. Aside from the small Grand Junction and Pueblo metropolitan statistical areas, the district is rural. Its economy depends heavily on mining, oil and gas production, and agriculture.
For many in the mountainous region, a call to 911 might bring help in an hour if all goes well. Residents commonly protect their lives, properties, livestock and pets with guns.
Boebert threatens nothing about the economy or culture of the Western Slope. She’s a pro-Second Amendment activist, a small-business entrepreneur in the village of Rifle, and she supports fracking, mining and agriculture.
The retired sociology professor, from the upscale resort town of Steamboat Springs, has almost nothing in common with most of the people in the district. She’s a much better fit for Boulder, in Congressional District 2.
Mitsch Bush served in the Colorado House from 2013-2017 and sponsored, co-sponsored or otherwise supported every anti-oil and gas and anti-Second Amendment measure that came along. She voted for a bill to disarm college students licensed by law enforcement to carry concealed handguns for personal safety, making young women more susceptible to sexual assaults on campus.
A review of the professor’s five-year voting record unveils one of the past decade’s farthest-left Colorado legislators.
More telling is that Mitsch Bush has contributed money to support the far-left publication “In These Times,” founded in Chicago in 1976 by former Communist Party member James Weinstein as the country’s “Independent Socialist Newspaper.”
The magazine published an article that called the Second Amendment right to self-defense “insane.”
“There’s nobody who should have a ‘right’ to a gun in America,” wrote self-proclaimed “Democratic Socialist” Thom Hartmann in the magazine Mitsch Bush supported.
So, it is no surprise to learn at least four organizations dedicated to opposing the Second Amendment — a law important to life in rural America — have endorsed Mitsch Bush.
When the “In These Times” isn’t challenging the Second Amendment, it is bashing the farmers and ranchers Mitsch Bush hopes to represent.
“Climate-Friendly Beef is a Myth. Don’t Buy It,” screams a headline in the Mitsch Bush-supported magazine, introducing a story that excoriates Colorado’s largest export product.
Among organizations endorsing Mitsch Bush is Indivisible, which leads the “defund the police” movement, stating on its website that “police and law enforcement represent harm and terror — not safety.”
Mitsch Bush feels honored by the endorsement and expressed her appreciation on Facebook when she found out the anti-cop movement was about to support her.
”We’ve been nominated for an Indivisible national endorsement!” Mitsch book wrote on Facebook, linking to Indivisible’s nomination website.
Mitsch Bush stated her support for Proposition 113, which sells out Colorado’s electoral votes to wealthy Californians who would like to control our Western Slope water.
Mitsch Bush campaigns as a moderate, but her past contradicts the pretense. In Washington, she would contribute to the left’s anti-rural agenda that tries to force urban values and lifestyles on farmers, ranchers, miners, and energy workers who make up much of the Third Congressional District.
Imagine the next crony of AOC emerging from the slopes, valleys and farmlands of District Three. It doesn’t get weirder than that.
The Gazette editorial board
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