The Revenge of the Virtue Signallers

Tonight, President Trump will announce the winners of the Fake News Awards.  Never Trumper Jeff Flake has already held a speech on the Senate floor denouncing President Trump’s treatment of the media.  In an interview with MSNBC’s Kacie Hunt, Flake compared the President’s treatment of the media to Joseph Stalin, the Russian tyrant who caused the deaths of millions of Soviets during his reign of terror.  A tweet from Instapundit calls out the absurdity of Flake’s comparison saying “Trump hasn’t starved anyone, imprisoned his political opponents, sent people to gulags, etc.  This is an insult to Stalin’s victims, and to his listeners’ intelligence.” It looks like Flake, along with many of his counterparts on the left, has developed a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. 

     

 

Flake has done everything he can to make sure that the mainstream media does not lump him in with the “basket of deplorables.”  He wrote a book called Conscience of a Conservative denouncing the Trump Administration.  Flake’s choice of titles did not impress Media Research Center Founder and President Brent Bozell III, whose father Brent Bozell Jr. ghostwrote the original Conscience of a Conservative.  Perhaps Gut Instincts of a Globalist would have served as a better title for Flake’s self-reflecting piece.     

 

In October, Senator Flake announced that he would not seek re-election to a full term in the Senate; apparently seeing the writing on the wall.  According to the Morning Consult, Flake has one of the highest disapproval ratings of any Senator in the country.  To paraphrase President Trump, Flake could probably not get elected dogcatcher in the state of Arizona.  So far, Former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Rep. Martha McSally, and Senator John McCain’s 2016 primary opponent Kelli Ward have announced their intentions to run for the Republican nomination while Rep. Krysten Sinema seems like the most likely candidate for the Democratic nomination.  I can’t help but wonder if Flake will actually support a Democrat as his successor.  That would not be out of character for Flake since he bragged about writing a $100 check to Alabama Democratic Senate Candidate Doug Jones with the memo “country over party.”

 

Flake refused to get behind the tax reform bill without a promise for a DACA fix.  He could not even get behind tax cuts, which historically serve as the one item of unity among a divided Republican caucus.  I can’t help but wonder if Flake would have gotten behind the tax bill if President Jeb Bush sat in the oval office.  Then again, President Jeb would probably have already signed DACA into law on his first day in office.  Flake has become more of a thorn in the President’s side than his fellow Senator from Arizona, John McCain.  Both Flake and McCain appear to dislike President Trump for personal reasons.  McCain, along with his BFF Lindsey Graham, have won acclaim from the mainstream media for their criticism of talk radio.                 

 

With Flake’s retirement pending, the media has already begun their search for a Republican who will take on the role as “conscientious objector” to the Trump Administration.  Rumor has it that 2012 Republican Presidential Mitt Romney who held a press conference where referred to Candidate Trump as a “fraud” and actively campaigned against him during the 2016 Republican Primary, will run for the Senate seat currently held by Senator Orrin Hatch, who will also refrain from running for re-election after representing the state of Utah in the upper chamber for the past 42 years.  Hatch had become quite close to the Trump Administration, describing President Trump as “one of the best Presidents I’ve served under” much to the chagrin of the mainstream media.  If Romney had attacked President Obama with the same passion that he used to go after President Trump, he may have actually won the 2012 Presidential election.  Flake has indicated that he wants Romney to succeed him as “conscientious objector.”  President Trump had previously considered Romney for the Secretary of State position, which ultimately went to Rex Tillerson.  Romney’s lukewarm history with President Trump might not hurt him that much in Utah, which President Trump only carried with 46 percent of the vote, in contrast to Romney carrying the state with 71 percent of the vote four years earlier.  In 2016, many Republicans opted to vote for third party candidate Evan McMuffin, a Utah native who had the backing of the relentless Never Trumpers including The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol.  In the Republican primary, President Trump came in third place in Utah; his worst showing in any of the fifty states.   

 

Any conscientious objector to the Trump Administration will have to win the approval of the mainstream media.  Another potential candidate to serve in this position is Colorado Senator Cory Gardner.  Gardner is one of three Republican Senators who represent a state that Hillary Clinton won in the 2016 Presidential election.  Gardner announced that he would block Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ nominees to the Department of Justice in retaliation for the Justice Department’s decision to rescind an Obama-era policy known as the Cole memorandum that asked the DOJ not to enforce the Federal laws on marijuana.  So Gardner will allow members of the “Deep State” to remain in the Department of Justice all because he doesn’t like the fact that the Trump Justice Department actually has an interest in enforcing Federal laws, even the “unhip” ones.  If Congress hates the Federal laws on marijuana so much, it has the power to change them.  Until then, the Department of Justice will do its job and enforce the law.  Conservatives invested heavily in Gardner, who provided them with an initially unexpected victory over incumbent Democratic Senator Mark Udall in the 2014 midterm elections that saw Republicans net nine Senate seats.  Udall had earned himself the nickname “Senator Uterus” because of his obsession with a “woman’s right to choose.”  Gardner, along with Flake and a few members of the “Gang of Eight” including “Dicky Durbin”, crafted an immigration bill that seems tone-deaf to the voters’ wishes as expressed in the 2016 Presidential Election.  Apparently, the new “Gang of Six” did not learn very much from their mistakes in the “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill that arguably cost Marco Rubio the 2016 Presidential Nomination.  The bill would give amnesty to the roughly 800,000 DACA recipients and some of their relatives while doing little to address the systemic problem of chain migration that has led to an explosion in the foreign-born population in the United States and providing just enough money for a wall that will cover less than one-tenth of our southern border with Mexico.  The Center for Immigration Studies describes the bill as “maximum amnesty, minimum border security, and no cuts to legal immigration.”  A group of House Republicans, including House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, have put together a much more palatable bill called the “Securing America’s Future Act.”  

 

A year into the Trump Presidency, the battle between establishment and anti-establishment Republicans continues.  The globalist forces in the Republican Party hope that with Bannon out of the way, President Trump will become one of them.  As evidenced by his press conference yesterday, Senator Lindsey Graham thinks the White House still has to go further to purge the President’s inner circle of people who have “an irrational view of how to fix immigration.”  Many interpreted Graham’s comments as a veiled swipe at White House Policy Advisor Stephen Miller, one of the few in the President’s inner circle who wholeheartedly endorses an “America First” immigration policy.  As Newt Gingrich explained on “Hannity” last week, “We’re in an identity fight in which we win, they disappear.  If they win, we disappear.”  I find it quite “irrational” that Graham would want to get behind an immigration bill that would give the left everything they need to make conservatism disappear.  I can’t help but think that a select few in the Republican Party secretly want the Democrats to regain control of Congress and maybe even the Presidency.   

 

Senator Flake ended up giving his speech before the President announced the winners of the Fake News Awards.  During his speech, Flake said that “Democracy won’t last without truth.”  The Senator fails to realize that democracy will not last with open borders.  He also fails to realize that the media, which he referred to as “the guardian of democracy” has made every attempt to undermine our democracy.

 

President Trump’s Fake News Awards will surely crush Jeff Flake’s virtue-signaling Senate speech in the ratings.  On the bright side, Flake’s Senate speech will serve as a nice audition tape when he goes to apply for a Contributor position at CNN or MSNBC.  I can make a prediction that the media will plead President Trump to be more like Jeff Flake.  The American people will respond by saying “no thanks.”