What The Actual F*ck Is Wrong With Colorado Dem Gov Jared Polis?
Jared Polis, you are the worst.
We hope Colorado Gov. Jared Polis enjoyed his political career, because we suspect it ended the minute he signed a commutation for convicted felon and abject idiot Tina Peters last Friday.
But Polis does not see it that way. Is he in some sort of information bubble? Has he not talked to literally any other Democrats, particularly the party base, in the last year? Is he, like Peters, an abject idiot?
Polis was attending a “legislative recap event” put on by The Colorado Sun when he was asked to defend his actions:
“I think this will be remembered fondly. The nation needs to have a reconciliation and healing. People know I’m a man of action. I’m a bold person, I’m going to do things that I think are right, and that’s why people put me here. They want me to do things that I think are right.”
Oh sure. Or maybe you caved to Donald Trump, who has made Peters one of his pet causes to the point where he actually issued her a pardon that was as worthless as dog shit because she was convicted on state charges, not federal. And has been yanking federal funding from the state for all sorts of stuff — most notably a clean water project — as a way of applying pressure.
Polis claims Trump had nothing to do with it. Which is somehow worse! If you had the excuse that you were doing this for the greater good of the state, we would still think you suck, but it would be at least slightly defensible.
Instead, this is a bit like pardoning John Wayne Gacy because his birthday clown act brought joy to children.
As one Denver-area reporter noted, Polis was later greeted by protesters holding up a sign that said, “EAT SHIT POLIS.” The people who are going to remember this act fondly must have all been in the bathroom.
Peters was serving a nine-year prison sentence for her actions in trying to prove that the 2020 election was stolen from The Glorious Sun and All the Stars in the Firmament, Donald Trump. As the county clerk in charge of elections in Mesa County, she got a fake ID for one of her fellow loons that allowed him to break into the county’s voting machines to search for nonexistent fraud. Peters also helped out by unlocking doors to her office building where the machines were kept, turning off nearby security cameras, and buying all her co-conspirators burner phones so they could communicate without leaving a trail. She was convicted on seven out of 10 counts, including attempting to influence public officials and conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation.
She also tried to record one of the co-conspirators who flipped on her with an iPad in court, which resulted in someone videotaping her getting arrested at a coffee shop and flipping out, kicking one of the cops in the process. Lucky for her she wasn’t charged with assaulting a police officer. If she was Black, that alone would have gotten her a ridiculously long sentence.
At Peters’s sentencing, she got a long and very satisfying lecture from the judge, during which he excoriated her for her lack of remorse and her continued assertions of voter fraud that everyone whose head isn’t full of bees knows did not happen. He particularly criticized her for saying such words given how much influence she had as a public official.
That turns out to have been what got her off the hook here, according to a writer at Mother Jones who defended Polis over the weekend. Her lawyers were able to argue that the judge had come down particularly hard on Peters for what she said in and out of the courtroom, not based on the crimes for which she was convicted:
Last month, three Colorado appellate judges—all of whom were appointed by Polis’ Democratic predecessor—unanimously threw out Peters’ prison sentence, declaring it a clear violation of her First Amendment free speech rights.
The judges also ordered that Peters be resentenced. But before that could happen, Polis commuted her sentence to four-and-a-half years and ordered her paroled on June 1. She will have served about a year and a half in the pokey.
How bad was this defense by Mother Jones?
But nine years is an awfully long time. She is 70 and has already been in prison for more than a year and a half. A defendant who pleaded guilty to similar charges in the doomed Trump RICO prosecution in Georgia received probation.
Yr Wonkette can see the argument that Peters should have been sentenced because of what she did, not what she said, as stupid and harmful to the public order those statements might have been.
The rest of it, though? Public officials throughout our nation’s illustrious history have served longer sentences than that for corruption, and Peters’s corruption was as much a violation of the public trust as if she’d embezzled taxpayers’ money. Betraying that trust in the interest of subverting democracy is a betrayal of the public you are sworn to serve. It is hard to think of a worse nonviolent crime for an elected official to commit.
We don’t care that Peters is 70, she should have perhaps considered her age before she did all those crimes. Maybe if she had done them in Georgia — and pleaded guilty, another difference — she would have gotten off easier, but she didn’t. She did them in Colorado and was unrepentant about all of it.
For her part, Peters claims she has learned her lesson, sort of:
This would be much more convincing if she had not been posting from prison as recently as March accusations that Colorado’s Democratic Secretary of State had “deleted election records” and implying that they are still using voting machines to commit fraud somehow.
Personally, we don’t want to hear it. You want to make amends, Tina Peters? Not necessary. Just thank whatever god you believe in that the governor of your state is a dope whose brain is made of melted gouda and fuck off from public life forever. Go hang out with your grandkids, assuming they are too young to read the news and don’t know what a whiny lunatic you are.
Actually, scratch that. You should probably only be allowed around your grandkids with court-approved supervision.
As for Polis, we don’t think he’ll be remembered fondly. He has been blasted by the Republican who prosecuted Peters. Sen. Michael Bennett promised that if he wins the governor’s race this fall, he will not appoint Polis to take his place in the Senate.
Of course Polis said he has “no plans to run for anything,” which is another way of saying, You think you’re running me out of politics because of my galactically stupid decision? Joke’s on you, I don’t want to be in elected office anyway, MOM.
We suppose if there is a hint of a silver lining here — and it isn’t much — it is that Polis merely commuted Peters’s sentence. He did not grant her the full pardon that her supporters had been pushing for. Does that mean she’ll be eligible for a payout from Donald Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund that he’s using to pay off all the people he pardoned for trashing the Capitol and trying a million ways to overturn the election for him? JD Vance says yes! Of course, he also thinks all she did was, at worst, “misdemeanor trespassing,” because JD Vance does not have the brains or the moral clarity that God gave an avocado.
As for Polis, we’ve made quite a few cracks about him since the commutation was announced, such as Maybe he can still get a job as a Mar-a-Lago towel boy. Or Someone on Peters’s side must have some pictures of Jared Polis at a goat orgy with a bucket of Crisco and a mischievous smile.
But we don’t need some grand conspiracy. The dude just sucks.
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Even the *Republicans* in Colorado were pissed - the DA that prosecuted Peters ripped Polis a new orifice over this.
Way to channel your inner Fetterman, Jared.