The two Republican senators from Arizona have evidently decided to tag team in their efforts to belittle President Donald Trump while playing for affection from the mainstream media. Jeff Flake delivered a blistering speech from the Senate floor Wednesday, eviscerating Trump for his rhetoric about the press. John McCain took to the pages of The Washington Post with his own condemnatory opinion piece making the same argument. While both make some fair criticisms of the president’s temperament, they’re also completely missing the point.

Following the Democrat and MSM narrative, Flake and McCain worry that Trump is endangering the freedom of the press with his combative rhetoric and “fake news” awards. But Trump, who the Leftmedia regularly and repeatedly label as everything from a racist to mentally unstable, is clearly not the one responsible for “discrediting” the free press. Journalists have only themselves to blame for that.

As for the senators’ idea that Trump is echoing Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, or providing justification for despots around the world to persecute journalists, we’d counter, as we did Tuesday, that it wasn’t Trump who ordered the Justice Department to go after journalists and their sources. That was Barack Obama’s M.O. Where is Flake’s speech or McCain’s op-ed blasting Obama for his real threat to a free press?

Moreover, a news flash: This “fake news” phenomenon among tyrants has been around for a lot longer than Trump, as both senators well know. It used to go by the term “propaganda.” The truth is, if Trump had never uttered the phrase “fake news,” it would not change the long-running practice of totalitarian regimes suppressing journalistic freedom.

Both senators should be ashamed of doing nothing more than ingratiating themselves to the Democrat/Media Complex. Yet they seem to view the MSM as having the authority to dictate how Americans are supposed to think on culture, politics and government. Theirs is not a plea for freedom or truthfulness, but rather a call for Trump to surrender to the dictates of the PC police.
 No wonder McCain lost in 2008 and Flake is headed for the exit this year.

It would serve both senators well to ask why things like talk radio, Fox News and conservative websites like ours are so popular. It would do them some good to go around and talk to everyday working-class Americans and find out why they voted for a guy like Trump. Because, clearly, like most of the Beltway elites, these two still don’t get it. Americans simply got tired of being lied to and abused by Washington elites. They got tired of listening to mainstream news media outlets acting more often than not as cheerleaders for leftist social causes rather than defenders of Americans’ constitutional freedoms and rights. Americans got tired of hearing how they were the world’s biggest problem and that to be a proud American was wrong or immoral.

And Trump, warts and all, gets one yuge thing right: He doesn’t hide his immense pride in and love for his country and countrymen. He really believes that America and Americans are the best. It doesn’t play well with the Left, the MSM and Washington elites, but it does with Americans all across this great nation.

It’s not that we necessarily disagree with Flake or McCain that Trump’s sometimes reckless approach presents some problems, but it’s what they don’t say that is the most egregious error. It is the media’s collusion with the Democrat Party, not Trump’s rhetoric, that presents the greatest threat to Liberty.

On a related note, does CNN’s Jim Acosta think behaving like a total jackass is what constitutes a free press? Yes, yes he does.