There were a lot of takeaways from Joe Biden’s first State of the Union Tuesday night, but the one that dominated most of the news didn’t involve anything he said. It was Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene being total, predictable nuisances. Boebert was especially egregious. She heckled the president at the exact moment he started talking about his dead son Beau. Boebert inevitably doubled down on her comments, earning further condemnation, with some questioning the sincerity of her support for fallen troops.
One person who did just that was Eileen Rivers, an editor at USA Today and a veteran who spent four years as an Arab linguist. In a new column, Rivers took the Colorado representative to task, saying she “lowered discourse” while she “disrespected the office of the presidency.”
At the moment in Biden’s address, he was talking about soldiers who contract cancer on the job, as Beau may have. Right before a visibly choked-up Biden mentioned his deceased son, Boebert chimed in, shouting about the 13 U.S. soldiers killed during the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer.
“When Boebert interrupted him, I also got choked up out of a combination of anger, grief and frustration,” Rivers wrote. “No one should have their thoughts about service member sacrifice stifled. Everyone should be able to speak about the loss of a loved one. When she stifled the president, she was also stifling me. Surely others who have lost loved ones felt that, too.”
Rivers also called into question whether Boebert really speaks for the troops. “Boebert does not speak for me. And neither do other members of the GOP who reinforced her sentiments on social media,” she wrote. “Are they really supporting service members? Or cloaking their desire for division in false patriotism?”
She then offered Boebert and her like-minded colleagues some advice:
If Boebert and the others who support her want to do something real for military veterans, they can start by distancing themselves from everything she did Tuesday night. False bravado and empty tweets do nothing for members of the military. But finding a way to avoid putting U.S. troops in another conflict would save lives and help families. So would getting behind Biden’s call for increased mental health services at veterans hospitals across the country.
Rivers concluded that “[u]ntil heckles turn into real solutions, we should all be angry.”
You can read Rivers’ full op-ed at USA Today.