This is just a general suggestion to Sen. Jeff Flake, Republican with a new book to sell and a rocky-looking re-election bid, but maybe this just-recently-discovered and now incessantly promoted conscience of yours would be more convincing if it had at any point during your past career been, you know, identifiable to an outside observer.
Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said Sunday that Republicans should have done more to push back on “birtherism,” the conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama was not actually a U.S. citizen.
While he said he personally stood up to birthers, Flake told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he wished the party would have done more during this “particularly ugly” time.
If you remember Sen. Jeff Flake personally standing up to "birthers" in any noteworthy forum you have a better memory than I do—though there is occasional record of such feats. The true problem with Flake's new commitment to calling out his own party's ever-more-alarming rhetoric, however, is that his opposition appears to be, itself, solely rhetorical. As in, it lasts only up until the moment that he might have to act upon it.
In July he voted with other Senate Republicans to make John Bush, a man who published blog posts citing birther sources, a federal judge.
Well, now there you go, then; that's the entire point of the party's movement into birtherism and other conspiracy theories, of which there are now dozens. Jeff Flake and other "serious" Republican voices made grumbling noises against it, they will tell you, when they were personally pinned down to give an answer—but he and his fellow would-be objectors exacted not a bit of penalty on those that promoted it, and still refuse to do so. Jeff Flake was against "birtherism" on a personal level, but as his party peddled theories like the sitting president is secretly allied with Muslim extremists Jeff Flake took no action that would impede the rise of those voices to higher and higher prominence.
In ye olden days, the mechanism for ridding our discourse from liars and the conspiracy addled was simple: They were shamed out of the party. When it came time to hire them, members of the party would politely bow out. When it came time to reelect them or to elevate them to a new federal position, the would-be sensible voices ... declined to do it. It was not long ago a potential career-ender for a politician to have forgotten to pay certain kinds of taxes; it is no longer a career-ender for a politician to be arrested for physical assault. The Republican establishment for decades shuffled conspiracy theorists to the back rooms; now Flake's fellow legislators themselves draft up demands that the sitting (black) president prove he was not secretly smuggled into the United States as a child.
Jeff Flake is against that very much, he'll tell you. But he'll also support his party's effort to strip a currently sitting president from using his Supreme Court nomination powers in purely political machinations, and will obligingly overlook the Trump conflation of business and government, and will vote for the conspiracy-peddling Republican judge because, apparently, Jeff Flake's distaste for "birtherism" does not include a distaste for its purveyors.
That's exactly how we got to this moment—that, right there. He objects to his party's excesses not by blocking them, but by ignoring them. Jeff Flake has found his party crossing lines that turn his stomach, and his response is to write and sell a book suggesting that maybe somebody somewhere should have stopped his party from doing that.