The New York Times has long provided safe haven for failed and/or turncoat Republican politicians to lick their wounds and make excuses for themselves. Republican elected officials who disappointed their constituents are real entertainment for the radical leftists, after all.
Jeff Flake, a former one-term senator from here in Arizona, has been a particular darling of the Times ever since he was run out of office in 2018. Last weekend, the Times opened a bag of Beggin’ Strips and got their lapdog Flake to come running and obediently trash the GOP for Independence Day Weekend.
Here’s the beginning of Flake’s latest leftist whine-fest:
Eight years ago, I stood on the floor of the Senate and announced that I would not run for re-election. I spoke then of a fever in our politics, a fever that I hoped would soon break. I noted that in today’s Republican Party, anything short of complete and unquestioning loyalty to President Trump — then in his first term — was deemed unacceptable and suspect.
Last weekend, Senator Thom Tillis announced that he would not seek re-election, and delivered a message that echoed my own. “It’s become increasingly evident,” he said, “that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species.”
His decision underscores what I feared in 2017: The fever still hasn’t broken. In today’s Republican Party, voting your conscience is essentially disqualifying.
You can almost hear the Times Editorial Board patting Flake on the head and saying, “That’s a good boy.” Probably in Mandarin.
A little background refresher on Flake is in order here, given that he’s been off sniveling on the Never Trump Low-T Island for so many years now.
Before being elected to the Senate, Flake served for 12 years in the House of Representatives. He was a rock-solid, reliable conservative while in the House, which made his behavior in the Senate all the more problematic. When Flake succeeded Arizona conservative legend Jon Kyl in the Senate, something snapped and he got a little squirrelly.
Jeff Flake made the unfortunate choice to become John McCain’s “Mini-Me” once he was in the upper chamber. Worse yet, he was emulating Maverick when he was at the end of his career and in peak squish form. I hadn’t yet moved back to Arizona, but I was in frequent contact with a lot of conservatives here, all of whom had soured on McCain years earlier. That’s what made Flake’s decision to rubber stamp him all the more odd.
As he mentioned at the beginning of his article, Flake announced in the summer of 2017 that he wouldn’t run for re-election in 2018. His abandonment of his constituents coincided with Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency, and Flake took full advantage of that. Make no mistake — Flake’s defense of his Senate seat was still going to be in serious trouble if Hillary Clinton had been in office. He won the prevaricating excuse lottery though, and has been milking it ever since.
The writing was on the wall for Flake very early in 2017. The notion that the GOP was in full-throated, Trump loyalist MAGA mode back then is patently absurd and easily disproved. It’s nothing more than a comforting fairy tale for Jeff Flake and his family. My conservative friends and relatives who hadn’t voted for John McCain for two elections were not going to vote for Flake in 2018. McCain kept winning because he had decades’ worth of markers to call in. As I’ve written many times, it’s almost impossible to unseat a muti-term senator, but first-termers are ripe for the picking off. Flake hadn’t banked enough favors to survive a contentious primary.
Only in The New York Times will you see Thom Tillis held up as an ideal of what Republicans should be. I’ve been writing “What the hell was he thinking?” articles about Tillis for two years now. He co-sponsored an amnesty bill that strengthened Barack Obama’s DACA insanity. Tillis is the epitome of modern congressional bipartisanship, which always sees the Republicans caving to the Democrats.
Related: Will GOP Commit Political Suicide With Bipartisan Amnesty Bill?
Bipartisanship is not something noble to be sought with the 2025 Democratic lunatic asylum in Congress. It’s not that Flake isn’t reading the room — it’s that he’s about a hemisphere away from the room.
The greatest hope for the United States of America is in the Republican Party being able to keep the Democrats at bay until they either course-correct or implode. That’s not a job for back-stabbing squishes. President Trump has been working hard to marginalize the Bush/Cheney/Romney invertebrate wing of the GOP. It’s one of his greatest triumphs of the last nine years.
If that’s a fever, I hope it never breaks.
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