At least the likes of Mazie Hirano, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris et all have the honesty to put a “D” next to their names. Whether that D stands for Democrat, demagogue, demented, or merely delusional is up to the reader. Not so honest has been the likes of RINO poster child Sen. Jeff Flake, who found he couldn’t be elected the proverbial dogcatcher in his home state of Arizona and decided to leave the Senate, but not before he had his “Benedict Arnold moment” in a Senate elevator.

Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of President Trump has been to expose the deep state swamp creatures behind the curtain who have been pulling the levers of power for decades and have in the past two years have been trying to pull the rug out from under the Trump administration. Witness the Kavanaugh inquisition, which could have been made more farcical only if Peter Strzok and Lisa Page had been the agents assigned to do the umpteenth FBI background check of Judge Kavanaugh.

Jeff Flake has not exactly been Mr. Smith goes to Washington, but rather been a profile in porridge who cannot claim to be risking his political career, because he has none. It evaporated the moment Arizona voters realized Jeff Flake is a political chameleon with no backbone and no color palate. He is quite simply a grandstanding political coward whose true nature has been revealed by the Trump revolution and the Kavanaugh nomination. As GOP legend and Reagan guru Ed Rollins observes:

Earlier in the day on Friday Senator Jeff Flake announced he would vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh out of the Judiciary Committee. Then he got cornered in an elevator by a screaming leftist for 4 minutes. About an hour later and after several private talks with Democrats Jeff Flake came out and announced he would only vote for Brett Kavanaugh if an investigation continued on the man for another week. This is exactly what Democrats were hoping for. Longtime GOP consultant Ed Rollins commented on Flake’s cowardice. Lou Dobbs: They were intimidating Jeff Flake. They got him in a small room outside the hearing room and they were all piled in there. Ed Rollins: He will go down as one of the great turncoats and cowards in the political history of the US Senate based on this thing.

That is being charitable. Unless resurrected as the south end of a northbound independent presidential ticket, Flake is political roadkill who managed to give Americans the shaft after his elevator confrontation, following up us perfidy with a romp with honest Democrat Chis Coons at something called the Global Citizens Festival:

Smiling from ear to duplicitous ear, Sen. Jeff Flake (fake Republican-Ariz.) took the stage in front of a roaring crowd of #GlobalCitizens at a rock festival on Saturday. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), the chap who seems to have talked Flake into betraying his constituents and party leaders, was alongside him in a bipartisan show of support for the big fat wrench in the form of a "one-week" delay in the confirmation process for Judge Kavanaugh… You would think that in this very serious time, where Flake himself worried that America is tearing itself apart over the "intergalactic freakshow" the Senate process has become, he would be more reserved and serious about the decision he made to drag it out even longer and put half of the country he is supposed to be representing on high blood pressure meds. You would think he would have the good sense to be photographed with Mitch McConnell, looking deeply concerned. But no. Instead, we get this: He thinks he's a flippin' rock star! "You can join me in an elevator anytime!" a beaming Flake shouts to a crowd of screaming twenty-year-olds whose brains haven't fully developed yet and who probably think he's one of the dads on Full House. The audience he's trying to impress is full of the socialist-cheering young people hanging on every word of the likes of Janet Jackson, John Legend, Robert De Niro, and Disney stars I can't name. Every single one of them is a far-left kook.

Count the appropriately named Jeff Flake among them and his departure from the Senate can’t come soon enough. One wonders what possessed Chuck Grassley to permit this charade allowing Lucy to hold the football for Charlie Brown one more time or why Lindsey Graham, who grew a spine long enough to make an impassioned condemnation of this modern-day equivalent of the Salem witch trials, is suddenly fine with Flake’s switcheroo. No wonder the Democrats were seen laughing, exchanging high fives, and giving a bevy of thumbs up. It’s not over until the fat lady is offered another donut by goofy Republicans.

It was not long ago the Flake was on the Senate floor suggesting Trump was guilty of treason for giving aid and comfort to Russia:

The Trump-Helsinki summit brought new accusations in Congress Thursday, as GOP Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona accused the president of providing 'aid and comfort' to the enemy. Flake's choice of words evoked the Constitution's definition of treason -- at a time when President Trump is facing a new level of scrutiny for his refusal to forcefully condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin for election meddling during their summit meeting Monday in Finland. 'By choosing to reject objective reality in Helsinki, the president let down the free world by giving aid and comfort to an enemy of democracy. In so doing he dimmed the light of freedom ever so slightly in our own country,' said Flake, a Trump critic who has announced his retirement from the Senate at the end of his term.

Flake has also condemned Trump defending himself against the media’s ad hominem attacks on Trump, his family, his policies, and his competence, comparing Trump to former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin:

Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake took to the Senate floor Wednesday morning to formally rebuke President Donald Trump on his continuous attacks about the truthfulness of the news media… Flake has been known to denounce and criticize Trump’s actions, but his speech was a very straight forward rejection of the “fake news”/”alternative facts” era that the Trump administration has created… “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,” said Flake… During his speech, Flake also compared Trump’s rhetoric to that of late Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin after calling the news media the “enemy of the people,” a phrase famously known to be spoken by Stalin. “It is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own President uses words infamously spoken by Joseph Stalin to describe his enemies,” he said. “It bears noting that so fraught with malice was the phrase ‘enemy of the people,’ that even Nikita Khrushchev forbade its use, telling the Soviet Communist Party that the phrase had been introduced by Stalin for the purpose of ‘annihilating such individuals’ who disagreed with the supreme leader.”

The charges of Trump colluding with Russia are indeed a hoax and a falsehood, as much of a fraud perpetrated on the American people as Flake’s political career has been. That he has been allowed by Senate Republicans to exploit, manipulate, and possibly derail the Kavanaugh nomination process is a travesty that may justly doom the GOP’s election prospects in November. If Flake succeeds in bringing Kavanaugh down, the GOP deserves to go down with him.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.