CALLUM BORCHERS HAS NO IDEA HOW RIGHT-WINGERS THINK

Under the headline "Flake and Corker Feel Liberated to Speak Their Minds. That Should Terrify Trump," Callum Borchers of The Washington Post writes this about President Trump and Senator Jeff Flake:

As one of the most authentically conservative members of Congress, Flake has a level of moral authority rivaled by few others. He is the rightful ideological heir to Barry Goldwater, whose namesake institute Flake led before being elected to the House in 2000.

There is a very clear contrast between the president and the senator: Trump was a registered Democrat as recently as 2009. While he was defending partial-birth abortion, supporting an assault-weapons ban and filling Nancy Pelosi’s campaign coffers, Flake was proving his conservative bona fides by leading the charge to kill earmarks, voting against Medicare Part D despite arm-twisting from George W. Bush himself and speaking out against deficit spending by his own party. House GOP leaders even removed Flake from a choice slot on the House Judiciary Committee in 2007 as retaliation for his criticism.

This part of his background makes it hard for anyone to credibly argue that Flake speaking out against Trump is anything but principled.

None of this impresses right-wingers. They don't care about what you did for conservatism five years ago. They care about how many liberals you made cry today. And on that score, Trump is the truer conservative by far. Flake is the worst imaginable RINO.

If you upset liberals, right-wingers don't care about your party affiliation. Some of their favorite commentators -- Tammy Bruce, Camille Paglia, Pat Caddell, Doug Schoen, Harlan Hill -- still claim to be Democrats, or were Democrats for years. Every right-winger's favorite past president, Ronald Reagan, was a Democrat until a few years before he first ran for office as a Republican. During the Bush years, the right loved Democrat-turned-independent Joe Lieberman, because he was a tireless cheerleader for George W. Bush's Iraq War.

In the past 24 hours, Flake has voted with his party to deny defrauded bank customers access to the courts, and summarily rejected the notion of impeaching President Trump. But that doesn't matter to conservatives. He's saying some things that have elicited liberals' praise and given liberals hope. That's unforgivable. So no right-winger thinks he has "moral authority."