Data is the best. Or data are the best. Whatever. Everyone agrees that in politics, as in baseball, you can’t trust your own lying eyes. You have to look at the data.
So riddle me this: Is Jeff Flake a conservative?
I mean, he looks like a conservative and he sounds like a conservative. Even if Flake has never asked his supporters to beat up political protesters; or engaged in locker room talk; or donated money to Hillary Clinton; or supported Planned Parenthood; or flirted with single-payer health care (because those are all things that conservatives do these days) he sure comes across as a conservative.
And sure, the National Right to Life organization gives him a 100 percent rating. And the NRA’s legislative and lobbying arm gives him an “A” rating on the Second Amendment. But those are just anecdotes. What we need to understand is data. And thank goodness, Mark Levin is here to help.
Levin’s Conservative Review compiles a congressional ranking called the “Liberty Score” (all rights reserved) which takes the data from a politician’s positions on various issues and compresses it to a single, numerical score. Jeff Flake, Arizona’s junior senator, scores 53 out of 100. It’s all very scientific.
As you might imagine, certain True Conservatives have latched onto this number as proof positive that Flake is, in fact, not conservative. He is “an imposter” thundered Brent Bozell III, in the course of “denouncing” Flake—his word, not mine. “While [Flake] waxes poetically about conservative principles, his Conservative Review Liberty score is an abysmal 53%, also known as: ‘F’,” Bozell explained. Or, a “big fat F,” per conservative click-farm USA Politics Today. Mark Levin said that the Liberty Score made it clear that Flake was, in fact, a “liberal.”
And how are you going to dispute that? You get a 53 in Algebra II and you’re failing the class, buckaroo. That’s just a fact. It’s science.
Except, of course, that the data sometimes doesn’t tell you everything. There’s a competing conservative scorecard to Levin’s which is called, confusingly, Liberty for All. They do the same thing that Levin’s Liberty Score does, only less hysterically. They give Flake a 67 out of 100. Which doesn’t sound like much—you’d still fail Algebra with that number—except that Liberty for All notes that the Republican average is 45. So if Flake is a fake conservative soon to be switching parties—that’s Laura Ingraham’s prediction—so that he can find common cause with his fellow liberals, then so is the majority of the Republican conference.
It’s all so confusing.
And it gets even more confusing when you go back to Levin’s Liberty Score. Okay, so Flake’s 53 isn’t great. But how does that stack up against other senators who we suppose are conservative? Well, Pat Toomey is only slightly better, at 59. Ron Johnson is at 56. Deb Fisher and John Boozman—aren’t they pretty conservative?—are tied at 58 a piece.
But wait! There’s more! Louisiana senator John Kennedy was a Democrat until 2007. He gets a perfect 100 on the Liberty Score. And Elizabeth Warren—who is maybe, possibly, not very conservative—and Bernie Sanders—who is an admitted socialist—score higher (18 and 17, respectively) than either Lamar Alexander (16) or Susan Collins (12).
If you want to say that Jeff Flake isn’t conservative enough for your tastes, fine. If you want to say that he shouldn’t criticize a Republican president, that’s fine, too.
But anyone who’s trotting out this ridiculous “Liberty Score” as part of their explanation as to why Flake should be considered an unperson is a joke.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: Trumpism corrupts.
