Immediately after Jeff Flake’s tap-out speech yesterday, the Ze-Person Trump Haters Club on the left began praising this brave voice crying into his party’s wilderness.
As usual, they were wrong in their assessment of the situation.
The journolist crowd is nothing if not repetitive, so one example will suffice:
Flake WANTED to. But realized he couldn’t win given changes in today’s GOP https://t.co/GRorC5rI3H
— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) October 24, 2017
The sentiment being sold by Flake’s new-ish (he’s been actively courting their favor for months) fan club is that Trump’s GOP has changed so much that a principled politician like Flake couldn’t survive a primary challenge.
My instinctive response to that isn’t something that I can share with our polite readership, so allow me to chronologically appropriate a response from a bygone era: balderdash.
The even slower-thinking (yes, it’s possible) media hacks simply resorted to all they know how to do anymore, which is whine about President Trump:
Chuck Todd: Flake and Corker wouldn't have dropped out if "Trump were more polite" https://t.co/twQ2nZyTuu pic.twitter.com/Kv9COzD10w
— The Hill (@thehill) October 25, 2017
The rumor around NBC News is that Chuck Todd did once have an original thought, but it happened while he was alone in the woods so it can’t be proven to have happened.
Therefore he’s a perfect vessel to regurgitate the narrative.
Jeff Flake’s political demise is Jeff Flake’s fault and no one else’s. It’s tempting to give some blame to John McCain as Flake became nothing more than Maverick’s “Mini-Me” during his one term in the Senate. But that was a choice he made. When Flake was first elected, McCain had been far past his expiration date with conservatives both nationally and at home. Flake was still a good conservative then, and willingly chose to mimic McCain.
McCain gets away with being as awful as he is because, like all senators who have been in Washington for too long, he’s spent several decades bringing home goodies to the money people in his state, like the Chamber of Commerce. Long-tenured senators survive most primary challenges because they are able to financially crush the upstarts.
Flake, as a first-termer, had no such luxury.
As I have written before, I’m originally from Arizona and got my start as a political activist there. While the political demographics have shifted considerably there in recent years, it is still a red state. In fact, Jeff Flake lives in one of the reddest cities of the state, Mesa. How he decided that wandering leftward would be good for him remains a mystery.
Flake became less-than-conservative on any number of issues. He got squishy on Cuba. He lost his mind on DACA.
It is one thing to attempt to walk down the middle or slightly to the left on immigration issues if you’re a Republican from the northeast. It is an overwhelmingly stupid thing to do if you are a Republican representing the border state that deals with the worst of the drug-related messes and violence that flow in illegally from Mexico.
Flake thumbed his nose at the people who voted for him and they responded with a finger.
Former Congressman Joe Walsh tweeted that Flake was a “good man” but “failed to appreciate” some things. This was my response:
People elected to office in a representative republic who abandon their constituents aren't good people. Quite the opposite. https://t.co/eK8UYcaY9L
— SFK (@stephenkruiser) October 25, 2017
People throw around the misbegotten notion that America is a democracy so much that I believe a majority of the population forgets all about the “representative republic” reality.
Jeff Flake isn’t a deeply principled man who stood up to a party that had lost its way and abandoned him, as the MSM and the #NeverTrump crowd would have you believe.
He is actually an almost perfect example of a highly functioning representative republic. Flake was the one who did the abandoning, and he did it to the people he was being paid quite well to represent. They in turn let him know that they would abandon him at the polls next year.
That’s how that is supposed to work.
Represent or go home.
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