Politics As Unusual: Bike Conspiracy Guy Beats Serial Plagiarist

I considered renting a bicycle when I was in Denver last week until I read in the local paper that doing so could jeopardize the precious freedoms we enjoy as citizens of this great country.

Whoa. Wouldn’t want that on my conscience.

The way it was explained in the paper, Denver’s B-Cycle program is an outgrowth of the Mile High City’s membership in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives. The purpose of ICLEI, which was founded 20 years ago at a UN meeting, is to help local governments achieve sustainability objectives. The council has about 1,200 member municipalities, including 600 in the United States.

It sounds pretty benign, but making it easy for folks to burn calories rather than fossil fuels didn’t fool Dan Maes, a Republican candidate for governor of Colorado.

‘If you do your homework and research,’ Maes told the Denver Post, ‘you realize ICLEI is part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty.’

Here is what else Maes told the Post about the rent-a-bike program:

‘This is all very well-disguised, but it will be exposed.’ ‘This is bigger than it looks like on the surface, and it could threaten our personal freedoms.’ ‘These aren’t just warm fuzzy ideas from the mayor. These are very specific strategies that are dictated to us by the United Nations program…These mayors are signing on to this UN agreement to have their cities abide by this dream philosophy.’ ‘Some would argue this document that mayors have signed is contradictory to our own Constitution.’

Believe me, I was tempted to dismiss Maes’s pronouncements as the ravings of an ultra-right-wing nutball. But here was the thing: The guy wasn’t some kind of fringe candidate. On the eve of last Tuesday’s primary he had pulled into a flat-footed tie with former Congressman Scott McInnis.

Naturally, Maes’ remarks about the rent-a-bike program caught the attention of MSNBC, which invited him on the air to explain how, exactly, a program that entails voluntarily swiping your credit card to rent a bicycle (much as one might rent a luggage cart at the airport), might deprive us of our freedom.

Naturally, the candidate claimed the Post took his comments out of context. There’s nothing wrong with the bike program, he said. But ‘when a mayor signs onto a program sponsored by the United Nations, that should bring concern to people as to how the program may or may not be compatible with our state constitution.’

The reason for all Maes’s talk about mayors: The Democratic nominee is Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper. Maes couldn’t blame Hickenlooper directly for handing the city over to the UN, since that happened before his potential opponent took office, so he must have figured that if he said ‘mayor,’ ‘UN,’ and ‘lose our freedom’ in the same sentence enough times, susceptible voters might gravitate toward the totally unqualified candidate.

This is how our politics works these days, not just in the Rockies, but everywhere east and west of them as well. A right-wing politician says something preposterous, ‘lamestream media’ commentators point out that it is preposterous, which then proves to an astonishing number of citizens that what the politician said must be true (see persistent claims that President Obama is a Muslim, a Socialist and constitutionally ineligible to be the nation’s chief executive because he was born outside the United States).

Now here’s the kicker: Maes got the most votes in Tuesday’s primary election. Think about it: Nearly 200,000 Colorado Republicans deemed this guy the best choice to run their state.

As you might imagine, Maes, the tea partiers’ preference, was helped by the fact that his opponent was not exactly the brightest bulb in the marquee either. McInnis, the former Congressman, got a $300,000 grant from a private foundation a few years ago to write a series of reports on water rights. He apparently slapped them together using big chunks of material written by other people. When accused of plagiarism, he tried to blame a researcher who refused to be the fall guy.

The bicycle conspiracy nut beat the plagiarist by less than 2 percentage points. Little wonder that the Post was reporting that the Colorado GOP was looking for an alternative candidate and hoping to persuade Maes to step aside.

If this isn’t bizarre enough for you, consider that Tom Tancredo, another former Republican congressman, is also planning to run in November as the candidate of the American Constitution Party. Tancredo recently proclaimed that the greatest threat to our way of life isn’t al Qaeda but ‘the man that’s sitting in the White House today.’

Just the week before, I attended the game at Coors Field where the Colorado Rockies set a Major League record by getting 11 consecutive hits in an inning. I thought, mile-high baseball: crazy. Turns out mile-high politics is even crazier.