Pour One Out For The GOP, Latest Casualty In NRA Civil War

It's a holiday weekend NICE TIME!

It's almost 2020, and it looks like the RNC will be running Republican election efforts without its regular posse of irregulars. Because the Koch brothers made so many right turns they wound up on a double-date to a peace rally with George Soros. The Chamber of Commerce is looking for some nice country club Republicans to hang out with, normal people who understand we need immigrant labor and we do not need tariffs! (They'll stick with Mitch McConnell, but they've got their tax cuts now, and they'd like to go back to normal before Trump bumbles into a war. Or a recession. Or both.) Plus the NRA is having a full blown meltdown before our eyes.

WOMP WOMP.

 Politico reports that the Money Gippers are quietly losing their shit that the cash cows are noping out before the race even gets started, leaving them to lean on Trump's slimy PACs funded by God only knows who .

"Right now, the party is functioning," Club for Growth president David McIntosh told Politico. "But if you see another collapse or if we lose the White House, I think you're going to see Republicans frankly in a world of hurt without a major funding group like that."

Problems are most acute at the NRA, where an investigation of the organization's tax exempt status by New York Attorney General Letitia James seems to have unleashed a wave of infighting and litigation which threatens to engulf the whole enterprise. But, don't worry guys, they're going to get indemnified by Texas.

...Texas will defend them & indemnify them against political harassment by New York State and Governor Cuomo. So ma… https: //t.co/0UZzWARrml

— Donald J. Trump (@Donald J. Trump) 1562066498.0 

UH ... OKAY.

In 2016, the NRA spent $54 millionto support specific candidates, including $30 million to help Donald Trump, plus tens of millions more on lobbying efforts. In 2018, they spent $9.5 million. But the organization closed out last year $10 million in the red, despite freezing pension contributions and even nixing free coffee for employees at its headquarters. This morning, the New York Times reported that at least two major donors are closing their wallets until the NRA leadership shitshow is resolved, and a prominent gunhumping YouTuber with four million followers is severing his ties with the murderstick lobby as well.

Reached for comment, NRA President Carolyn "Heritage Not Just Hate" Meadows put those Times reporters in their place.

Carolyn Meadows, the N.R.A.'s president, said in a statement that "we are disappointed whenever donors choose to suspend their support of the N.R.A., but we hope to win them back." She added: "People may resist change, but they embrace progress. We're experiencing that right now at the N.R.A. There's an energy within the N.R.A. that is hard to describe — and we continue to earn the support of millions of loyal members."

Consider yourself INDEMNIFIED!

Just this afternoon, the Washington Post reports that, after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre overruled dissenting voices in his own organization, including that of chief lobbyist Chris Cox, and insisted that the only solution to children murdered in school was more guns in schools. Then LaPierre and his wife mourned the deaths with a $70,000 trip to the Bahamas on a private jet, all expenses routed through the NRA's longtime advertiser (and current legal nemesis) Ackerman McQueen. Now Cox has been quitfired after aligning himself with Oliver North in the failed putsch against LaPierre, and NRATV is the latest casualty in the trench warfare between Ackerman and its old boss. The NRA may be embracing progress, or whatever Granny Gun was nattering about, but they're doing it on the cheap. They sure as hell don't have $50 to $80 million to dump into the 2020 elections.

Luckily, Donald Trump is a REAL LIFE BILLIONAIRE, who will spend what it takes to protect his party. LOL, we are silly heading into a holiday weekend. Must be an overdose of schadenfreude.

[ Politico / New York Times / Washington Post ]

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