As is so often the case, when I sat down to write one of my twice-weekly columns, I found that there were far too many interesting stories found on the pages (are they pages? Screens? I’m feeling old now) of Colorado Politics. And as my usually kindly editors have refused my entirely reasonable request to extend my column to 10,000 words (Ed: again, no), I’ll only have space to comment on a handful of items.

First, it was a great pleasure (I admit, I can be petty) to see Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters get arrested and booked, as she now perhaps understands that the law (and judge’s orders) apply to her too. She was released on bond, and we can see from her mugshot that she learned the important lesson of Tom Delay’s mugshot, wherein he is smiling, thus rendering the mugshot largely unusable for attack ads that would have preferred him in prison stripes with a dour and frowny face. And if you click on that last link, you will see that the picture itself is available for purchase on Amazon, which rather surprises me, but the free market is awesome.

I also would like to draw your attention to yet another noteworthy story in one of my absolute favorite CP columns, Out West Roundup. There you will find important stories on Montana’s efforts to work with the United States Forest Service on what trees are to be protected and which will be made available for logging. You can also see a consequential story on Utah’s efforts to ban trans kids from sports and a story on the rage of some New Mexico county commissioners toward the aforementioned Forest Service over their controlled burn policies during a time of great drought. Lastly, you should definitely read the story out of Jerome, Arizona regarding the police in that beautiful tourist area. It seems the cops there have started warning the roughly 450 residents to, well, stop yelling at tourists. Jerome is about two hours north of Phoenix and is apparently home to some grouchy folks. The cops have asked the people living there to be nicer to the visitors.

But I’m not going to write about any of that…

Instead, I’d like to draw your attention to an important CP story reporting on GOP gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl introducing her choice as running mate. Her proposed lieutenant governor is a gentleman named Danny Moore, a Navy vet and small business owner. So far, so good. In her remarks introducing Moore, Ganahl hit the GOP talking points of rising gas prices (someone on her staff should have told her that after hitting a high, gas prices are actually down 32 cents per-gallon. As she blamed Biden for the rise in gas prices, I’m quite sure that she will soon thank him for the falling prices, right?) and inflation and such, but one thing that she didn’t talk about, nor did Mr. Moore, was his history of election denial.

Dick Wadhams has a long and distinguished career in Republican politics. He is, as far as I can tell, in the mold of Bill Owens, a man with whom I differ on many, many policy areas, but who is personally and professionally honorable. Wadhams has an op-ed up on CP right now, in which he warns Republicans to be very, very careful about embracing those who advance the completely disproven and nonsensical Trump claim of a stolen election. Wadhams wisely notes the record of GOP election deniers in the last round of primaries. Colorado Republicans appear to be quite a bit brighter than those in some other states I could mention, and they rejected candidate after candidate that spewed conspiratorial nonsense.

Which makes the selection of Moore a tad surprising?

You see, Mr. Moore is on record as being an election denier. In fact, he appeared in the news when his fellow members of Colorado’s Independent Congressional Redistricting Commission voted unanimously to remove Moore as their chairman. There are also other news stories that report on Moore’s social media posts declaring his “doubts” about the 2020 election, but those posts have mysteriously (or not so mysteriously) been scrubbed from his Facebook account. Note to the GOP campaign: deleting stuff from the internet rarely makes it actually go away.

Moore posted a picture of President Joe Biden and wrote “This is the guy elected by the Democrat steal!” and “Do you think 80 million Americans voted for this guy!!!!” (Four exclamation points in the original, should have been a question mark, but I digress…) He also claimed that Biden’s win had “broken all of the mathematical and statistical models in history,” which, of course, it did not.

Yet Ganahl asserts “Danny is not an election denier,” which is an odd claim, given the actual evidence that he clearly is. But she is herself embracing the Trumpian campaign plan that if you lie and then become indigent when called out, you can get people to believe the lie.

The actual reporters at CP, who do the hard work, have repeatedly tried to interview either candidate, and the campaign refused to say whether Moore believes the 2020 election was stolen. A spokesperson for her campaign stated that they agreed that Biden is president and Polis is the governor — how kind of them.

I could rant on about the outrageousness of the Colorado GOP ticket for governor, but as I myself am a pretty partisan guy, I’ll let someone else have the last word.

Dick Wadhams said it best, “candidates must state clearly and succinctly that the election was not stolen, or they will not be credible in a general election in Colorado, period,”

Well said, Sir.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.