On Flake's Senate-floor speech this afternoon

Unprecedented in terms of choice of venue and the fact of a sitting Senator ripping into a president who is, at least on paper, of his own party.

He sure sounded full of conviction, didn't he?

But Erick Erickson's take is worth considering:

Oh poor Jeff Flake. Jeff Flake got bullied out of Washington by Trumpism. Flake is such a nice guy and there is no room for nice guys in the GOP any more. I am seeing all this all over social media and it is such horse crap.

Jeff Flake is leaving the Senate because he is a crappy politician who built his brand as one thing, used it to get to the Senate, then betrayed that brand once there.

I have covered this before, but Washington Conventional Wisdom would prefer you think this is about Jeff Flake vs. Donald Trump. The reality is that Flake could have stood up authentically to Donald Trump and been supported by his voters if Flake wasn’t such a bullsh…crap politician who essentially lied his way into the Senate.

The Club For Growth’s scorecard is the one Jeff Flake used to recruit donors and national support. Going all the way back to 2005, Flake had a consistently conservative record on fiscal issues. He was one of the very few congressmen supported by the Club with a lifetime 100% score. He literally was the candidate people pointed to as the model Club For Growth candidate.

But once in the Senate he gave all the fiscal conservatives the middle finger.

In 2013, the Club For Growth’s model candidate had an 84% score on their score card, below Mitch McConnell.

Compares Flake to Ben Sasse, who is certainly going to stay and who has higher scores from conservative groups.

It appears that the main thing going on here is that he's been keeping up on the numbers, and has concluded that his reelection prospects were not so solid.

That op-ed he wrote a while back that was culled from his new book, in which he extolled Bob Dole as an exemplary Republican, told me all I needed to know.

The poor fellow just came down with a terminal case of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.

Which makes him a poor example of opposition to Trump. We have Sasse - and, by the way, Erick Erickson.