Second, Abdul works for several established and respected news organizations. Rokita was arguing that he, not the owners and publishers of those outlets, was entitled to decide who was a journalist and who wasn’t. Perhaps that’s why the Society of Professional Journalists and other such organizations also came out against the attorney general’s ham-handed action.

Fourth and perhaps most important, there’s the epic level of hypocrisy involved here.

If Rokita were serious about banning people who weren’t “serious” journalists from his presence, he would refuse to sit down with, say, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson from Fox News. To save the network from crushing lawsuits, Fox has argued in court that nothing Hannity or Carlson says should be taken as either fact or truth because they are polemicists and entertainers, not journalists.

But if either Carlson or Hannity wanted to talk with Rokita, he not would only open his doors to them but likely inquire as to what surgery was necessary for him to be able to bear their children—the attorney general’s fulminations about transgender athletes notwithstanding.

The reality is that Rokita ran up the white flag here because he was going to lose and lose big.

Worse, some observers—including me—had begun to point out that the taxpayers were likely to have to pay quite a bit for his personal meltdown.

Even though he’s done a fair amount of losing, Rokita apparently doesn’t much enjoy the experience.

When he does lose, he looks for someone else to blame for his misfortune.

When there’s a factual error in reporting about him, he’s quick to demand a correction.

But when he does something foolish and there’s no factual error in the reporting, he fulminates about “fake news” and tries to direct people’s attention elsewhere.

He argues that the problem isn’t that he did something dumb or ill-advised. No, the problem is that others noticed that he did something dumb or ill-advised.

But that’s standard Todd Rokita.

He’s betting that enough Hoosiers won’t be able to tell the difference between a chestnut horse and a horse chestnut to elect him governor.

Or maybe, just maybe, he doesn’t know the difference himself.