Great Speech, Jeff Flake: Now Do Something About Trump

[babylonsister]

PUT MONEY WHERE YOUR MOUTH IS
Great Speech, Jeff Flake: Now Do Something About Trump
If his seat is filled by a Bannon acolyte while the president stomps all over the republic, all the words in the world won’t mean a thing.
Michael Tomasky
10.24.17 6:10 PM ET


Remember first that Jeff Flake is a very conservative legislator. Scores aren’t everything, by a long shot, but nevertheless it’s worth noting that the Arizona Republican has a 93 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union. That puts him up there in Jeff Sessions territory (94) and ahead of Mitch McConnell (89) and Orrin Hatch (88).

In other words, he’s no moderate, even though the media describe him that way. Twenty years ago, someone with his politics would have the rightest of the right.

But whatever Flake is ideologically, he demonstrated with that astounding speech announcing his retirement Tuesday that he’s something we’re awfully short on these days: He is a republican. That small “r” wasn’t a typo. A small-r republican is someone who believes in republican virtues: civic good faith, citizen engagement, the notion that citizenship imposes upon us responsibilities, the idea that our first and last loyalty is to those best principles, not to a party, and certainly not to a single man.

snip//

But now we have to ask: What will the impact be? Here, the ennobling goosebumps the speech inspired melt away fast. Because as much as I liked that speech, you liked that speech, every decent American liked that speech, you know who liked it more? Donald Trump. Steve Bannon. Indecent Americans.

They liked it because he said I’m quitting. To them, he’s another scalp for them to nail to the wall of their train as it steams toward the destruction of the republican norms of which Flake spoke. He’s the second scalp they’ve claimed in the last month, with Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker’s announcement in late September that he, too, is hanging it up, unable to function in a way that will permit him to look himself in the mirror in this Trumpian surreality.

So things go in Tennessee, and maybe too in Arizona, that these two Senate seats will be filled by Trumpers. In Arizona, there are a couple of Democrats who might have a shot, depending on whom the Republicans decide to nominate. There’s a GOP Congresswoman named Martha McSally, who has expressed reservations here and there about Trump, private reservations that somehow went public. And that’s nice. But recently the Arizona Republic found that she was the most pro-Trump member of the state’s congressional delegation, voting with him 96 percent of the time. And in Tennessee, forget about it. Three or four Republican state legislators had already announced that they were running against Corker, each Trumpier than the last.

What does this mean? It means first that Flake and Corker can’t just drop this. If there was anything disappointing about Flake’s announcement, it was: Why is he retiring? Why not fight? Why not offer himself as the Republican willing to show his fellow Republicans that there’s another way, that they can take on Trump and survive? Arizona’s conservative, but it isn’t Alabama.

more...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/great-speech-jeff-flake-now-do-something-about-trump

[deminks]

1. If he's such a goddam danger to democracy, then get him the f*** outta there, GrOPers.

I have no doubt that he is every bit as dangerous as you say.

[delisen]

2. Flake is not ruling out his own presidential bid

Possibly he is figuring that Trump's house of cards will fall and that Flake, by speaking out now, will be able to re-group the Republicans as the party of fiscal responsibility and "family values.'