Over the past week or so, Oklahoma Senator James Lankford has received more fawning attention from the national press than a young, nubile virgin at the Falls Creek Church Camp.
Mainstream media outlets from The New York Times to CNN to The AP and so on have portrayed him as an innocent bipartisan victim in today’s vitriolic political age – a noble man who’s been eaten alive and bullied by the uncompromising, obstruction-at-all-cost political vultures in the ultra-right wing political party and MAGA movement he’s enabled and helped create.
The New York Times really played up the victim treatment.
They went overboard to portray Lankford – an ultra-social conservative who routinely plays along with the party obstruction line and panders to the psychos in his own party – as some sort of modern-day Henry Clay.
Via the Times:
About an hour before Republicans sank a breakthrough border security compromise on Wednesday, Senator James Lankford, the bill’s lead negotiator, rose on the Senate floor to plead with members of his own party to take the deal that they had demanded — and that he had delivered.
“This is a problem that needs to be solved,” Mr. Lankford said in his signature baritone, his voice brimming with frustration. “Today, we get to decide if we’re going to do that or not — if we’re going to do nothing, or do something.”
Republicans chose nothing, as Mr. Lankford by then knew well that they would. And the Oklahoma Republican, who had spent months in an agonizing round of bipartisan negotiations on one of the nation’s most intractable issues, was left with little but the political wounds he had sustained.
“I feel like the guy standing in the middle of the field in a thunderstorm, holding up the metal stick,” he told reporters last week. A few days ago, he likened the process to having been run over by a bus — and then having it back up over him again.