Sen. Martha McSally must be feeling some heat.

It seems Arizona’s unelected senator realizes she needs to explain to voters – the ones who in 2018 sent Democrat Kyrsten Sinema to the Senate – why a United States senator would resort to a cheap fundraising stunt that made her look juvenile and a tad desperate.

McSally, who has spent the last two weeks lambasting the media, now says she that she wasn’t attacking a CNN reporter when she called him a “liberal hack”.

“Look, I’ve actually been attacked. For real in combat,” she wrote in an op-ed published Monday by The Arizona Republic. “This was no attack. It’s just the truth. And that’s fine! When did we become allergic to the truth?”

Perhaps about the same time “we” became allergic to answering questions?

McSally turned 'liberal hack' into dollar signs

McSally’s now-infamous rant came on Jan. 16 when CNN’s Capitol reporter Manu Raju had the nerve to ask her a question. It wasn’t loaded. It wasn’t disrespectful.

It was just this:

“Sen. McSally, should the Senate consider new evidence as part of the impeachment trial?”

Her reply: “Manu, you’re a liberal hack. I’m not talking to you.”

Raju: “You’re not going to comment, senator? About this?"

McSally: “You’re a liberal hack, buddy.”

McSally went on to immediately monetize her rant, mounting a fundraising campaign – isn’t it interesting that her staff caught the whole thing on video? – and launching a website, liberalhack.com, where she’s hawking “You’re a liberal hack, buddy” T-shirts.”

In her column, McSally says she was simply speaking the truth, that "the vast majority" of journalists are biased against Republicans in general and President Donald Trump in particular.

But then she says something downright peculiar.

She isn't winning with moderate women

“Predictably, his entire industry melted down,” she wrote. 'How dare someone – a woman, perhaps? – ‘lash out’ at a reporter like that! In a hallway, no less!' The pearl-clutching was more over-the-top than I could have ever imagined.”

So this combat veteran thinks her confrontation with Raju became a national story because she, a mere female, had the temerity to push back on a male reporter? That the blow back was a push back against women?

Pander much, Sen. McSally?

You will remember that McSally lost her bid for the Senate in 2018 because she couldn’t hold moderate voters – the ones who live in the Republican-rich suburbs of Maricopa County, the ones who voted for Trump in 2016 and Sinema two years later.

Many of those voters are women and polling suggests she’s not winning them back.

“She really has a female problem,’’ Mike Noble, of OH Predictive Insights, told me, referring to his latest polling on the Senate race. “She did very well with men. However, with females, especially with older females, she did not do well with them.

"Her biggest thing is with moderate voters and with women. She’s just not really connecting with them, especially with those 55 and older.”

McSally still didn't answer the question

I get it. So now people are picking on poor Martha McSally because she’s a woman?

“It may have been easier and safer if I just kept my mouth shut and smiled,” she wrote. “But that’s not the life I’ve lived. I flew 325 combat hours over Iraq and Afghanistan. I put my military career on the line to fight the Pentagon over making servicewomen wear Muslim garb in Saudi Arabia.”

“I don’t do easy and safe. I serve now like I have done my whole life, honestly and with my heart.”

McSally is to be commended for her military experience, which I believe she mentions no fewer than seven times in her column defending her behavior. The retired Air Force colonel was the nation’s first female combat pilot.

Now she’s turned her combat skills on a new enemy: journalists.

Case in point: “A couple of days after that flap in D.C. with a CNN reporter, I opened up my news clips to find the following headline: “Candidate Mark Kelly (bench) presses into campaign season in Flagstaff. I just laughed out loud. Reporters are breathlessly chasing Republican senators up and down the hall, and my opponent is (bench) pressing in Flagstaff, never to be asked a serious question about anything, apparently.”

Actually, in that article Kelly is asked the Raju question. And he answered it: Yes.

“I don’t know of many trials, if any -- none that I’m familiar with -- that were conducted without witnesses,” Kelly told the Arizona Daily Sun's Adrian Skabelund. “It’s pretty clear that the folks in the White House who have direct knowledge, who basically stand between the president and the folks who are on the ground in Ukraine, our government officials, have firsthand knowledge. So I think it’s important that United States senators get to hear from those witnesses.”

As with Kelly, many of McSally's Republican colleagues also have answered the question, though differently than Kelly. They have explained their thinking.

Then, there is McSally.

“It’s not that I have personal contempt for the reporter, his industry or even the question he asked,” McSally wrote. “I am not attacking First Amendment rights; I put my life on the line for them.”

Now she must think her political life is on the line because she wrote 824 words trying to explain her outburst, and the most interesting part of it all?

She never did answer Raju’s question.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com.