Making sense of Ana Navarro and other fake conservatives

Ana Navarro is about as much a conservative as Barack Obama is a potato.

At the risk of being misunderstood, that’s to say — not.

Yet Navarro happily masquerades as CNN’s token Conservative in the House pundit. As even Meghan McCain — no hard-line conservative herself — said back in January while chatting on “The View” about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, during which Navarro slammed President Donald Trump: “Ana … it’s really difficult for me to understand sometimes why you still consider yourself a Republican,” the Washington Examiner reported.

Ditto.

But here’s why — here’s the answer: Navarro’s fake Republicanism buys her media love.

The mainstream media adores her because she carries the Republican tag while marching to the Democratic drum. It’s a win-win. Navarro gets fame and fortune. The media gets to can act like it’s providing a fair and balanced report, while all the while, furthering its own leftist, progressive, anti-President Donald Trump agenda.

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Navarro’s latest attack on conservatism was especially golden for the media.

“Trump called Don Lemon, LeBron James and Maxine Waters, ‘dumb,’ ” Navarro wrote. “One is from the South. One is from Cleveland. One is from LA. One is in the NBA. One is on TV. One is in Congress. Hmmmm… I wonder what they could possibly have in common? Oh, wait.”

That they’re liberals? Nope. She meant black, of course.

In a double-down on CNN, Navarro later added that “if you don’t see [Trump’s rhetoric here] as racist, I would ask you to please go get your vision checked. … Remember, we’re not talking about this, you know, in a vacuum. This is not the one instance when Donald Trump has said something that is a dog whistle, a racist dog whistle,” Mediaite noted.

Indeed. The media’s been barking up the racist tree for months.

It’s easy, what with so many faux conservative pundits out there standing ready and willing to chip from this White House block, one potshot at a time.

The Washington Post has its George Will, who just urged conservatives to vote against Trump and the GOP in coming elections; the Weekly Standard has its Bill Kristol, who’s publicly denounced Tucker Carlson for “ethno-nationalism,” coming “close now to racism,” and for his ongoing opposition to Trump and support of establishment types like John Kasich and Jeff Flake.

And then there’s Jennifer Rubin, another gem of The Washington Post — another “conservative” darling of the left,

“Sarah Huckabee Sanders is so concerned that people aren’t nice to her,” Rubin said on “AM Joy” on MSNBC, The Hill reported. “And people like me think that — not that she should be harassed — but that she should be shunned. The reason is that she lies. … She has lied and she has endangered the lives of reporters and that’s why she should be shunned. Not harassed. Shunned.”

It’s not that Americans are stupid and can’t see these faux conservatives for what they are — anti-Trumpers and establishment-at-all-cost party partisans wrapped in a media-bestowed red bow.

It’s that the patronizing is so irksome.

It’s that members of the mainstream media seem to think that Americans are in fact too stupid to notice the quote-unquote Republicans they elevate to punditry are not putting out a conservative message, and that this cloaked, closeted approach to selling the liberal line actually works.

That’s just head-pattingly patronizing. The only saving grace to sanity is that it’s also completely ineffective. Just check out the poll numbers the press regularly receives for trustworthiness. Americans do know better. News consumers do see through the veil. And what they see is a weakness on the part of the press.

After all, if the message being sold in the media by the left-leaners were really worthwhile, it would stand easily in the face of challenge and pushback. It would stand strong to the arguments of true conservative pundits. There would be no need to invent “Republicans” from the slush piles of the Democratic, progressive-minded parties.

• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter, @ckchumley.