Senator Flake’s Sad, Pathetic and Ignorant Speech

Senator Flake, a politician who works hard at pretending to believe something, gave a speech attacking the President of the United States for criticizing the media. This Doonesbury character come to life ‘courageously’ delivered a speech defending major media conglomerates and their right to override elections.

Because he loves freedom and truth.

The speech perfectly captured Flake’s insipid cluelessness. It reads like it was written by a college sophomore who is very passionate about ideas, but doesn’t actually understand them.

Take his opening.

“Mr. President, near the beginning of the document that made us free, our Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident …” So, from our very beginnings, our freedom has been predicated on truth. The founders were visionary in this regard, understanding well that good faith and shared facts between the governed and the government would be the very basis of this ongoing idea of America.”

It’s an applause line, but no one’s applauding except the leftist media that hates the founders and Jefferson.

It’s also a line that could have only been produced by googling, “founders” and “truth”. Jefferson wasn’t writing about truth, as Flake invokes it, but about the principles on which this nation is based. And he’s saying that being self-evident, they don’t require further philosophical proofs. 

It has nothing to do with “shared facts between the governed and the government.” That’s a creepy prog idea with a whiff of 1984.

It was the year in which an unrelenting daily assault on the constitutionally-protected free press was launched by that same White House, an assault that is as unprecedented as it is unwarranted. “

Clearly, the Senator from the Washington Post isn’t too familiar with the Alien and Sedition Acts. 

By “unprecedented assault”, Flake means that the media and Trump have been attacking each other a whole lot. Rather than state this basic “truth”, Flake evades it and treats the media as a neutral party coming under attack for no reason at all.

So much for the truth.

“The enemy of the people,” was what the president of the United States called the free press in 2017… Mr. President, it is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies. 

This is almost too stupid to address. The phrase dates back to the Roman Empire. Stalin has no monopoly on it. And then, Flake goes Full Stalin and use the phase against Trump.

“And, of course, the president has it precisely backward — despotism is the enemy of the people.”

How genuinely stupid do you have to be to do this? “No one except an “enemy of the people” accuses someone else of being an enemy of the people.

“The free press is the despot’s enemy, which makes the free press the guardian of democracy.”

We allied with Stalin against Hitler (since the Flake loves invoking Stalin) to protect democracy. Did that make Stalin the guardian of democracy? Is Flake incapable of basic logic?

When a figure in power reflexively calls any press that doesn’t suit him “fake news,” it is that person who should be the figure of suspicion, not the press.

Fake news is a term the media began using after the election against any alternative media outlet that supported Trump. And urged Facebook and Google to censor them. Instead of addressing the actual censorship, Flake rises to the defense of Jeff Bezos’ paper.

Those of us who travel overseas, especially to war zones and other troubled areas around the globe, encounter members of US based media who risk their lives, and sometimes lose their lives, reporting on the truth. To dismiss their work as fake news is an affront to their commitment and their sacrifice.

Wave that bloody shirt, wave it high. How many soldiers have lost their lives in the last 20 years, how many police officers and how many reporters?

 Here in America, we do not pay obeisance to the powerful — in fact, we question the powerful most ardently

That’s why a Senator is giving a speech defending a handful of powerful media conglomerates and their right to remove the president from office.

No politician will ever get to tell us what the truth is and is not.

Except Senator Flake.

Of course, a major difference between politicians and the free press is that the press usually corrects itself when it gets something wrong. Politicians don’t.

Sure. Just ask Wolff. 

Now, we are told via Twitter that today the president intends to announce his choice for the “most corrupt and dishonest” media awards. It beggars belief that an American president would engage in such a spectacle. But here we are.

It beggars belief that Senator Flake would be engaging in this spectacle, but here we are.

And so, 2018 must be the year in which the truth takes a stand against power that would weaken it.

As embodied by Flake?

Mr. President, every word that a president utters projects American values around the world. The values of free expression and a reverence for the free press have been our global hallmark

We don’t reverse the press, but the principle of a free press. Sadly, Flake doesn’t know the difference. And so he’s given a speech revering the media, rather than the principles of a free press. From the beginning to the end of his speech, he shows that he has no idea what America actually stands for.

Link:  https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/269057/senator-flakes-sad-pathetic-and-ignorant-speech-daniel-greenfield

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