The NRA finds new ways to stoke the fires of the culture war

The National Rifle Association has a challenge: the far-right organization has allies running the federal government. In practical terms, that leaves NRA members with very little to fear, at least in political terms. The chances of a far-right Congress approving gun reforms that will be signed into law by Donald Trump are zero.

To be sure, the NRA still has to contend with public opinion. A new Quinnipiac poll, for example, released yesterday, found that 94% of Americans -- including 93% of Republicans and 92% of voters in gun-owning households -- support requiring background checks for all gun purchases.

But the fact remains that the NRA's Republican allies will simply ignore public attitudes on the subject -- a fact the NRA's members are no doubt aware of.

How, then, will the group keep its supporters engaged? By pointing to a different enemy: Democratic officials may not be in position to approve any national policies, but there are still liberals out there who, the NRA says in a new video, need to be defeated in a culture war:

"They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again. And then they use their ex-president to endorse 'the resistance.'

"All to make them march. Make them protest. Make them scream 'racism' and 'sexism' and 'xenophobia' and 'homophobia.' To smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law-abiding -- until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness.

"And when that happens, they'll use it as an excuse for their outrage. The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.

"I'm the National Rifle Association of America. And I'm freedom's safest place."

It's quite a worldview.

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Trump's ISIS plan looks awfully similar to Obama's ISIS plan

It was just a couple of years ago that Donald Trump said he had a secret plan to defeat ISIS. "Unfortunately, I'll probably have to tell at some point [what the plan is], but there is a method of defeating them quickly and effectively and having total victory," Trump said. He added at the time, "All I can tell you it is a foolproof way of winning."

Soon after, Trump said he'd like to share his secret plan, but if he did, other presidential candidates would steal his amazing national security solution. He told the Des Moines Register in June 2015, "The problem with politics is if I tell you right now, everyone else is going to say, 'Wow, what a great idea.' You're going to have 10 candidates go and use it, and they're going to forget where it came from, which is me. But no, I have an absolute way of defeating ISIS."

As regular readers know, Trump was lying. The president effectively admitted as much in January, when he signed an executive directive on the matter, asking his national security team to come up with some kind of anti-ISIS plan for him.

There have been hints in recent months that Trump's plan would mirror the Obama administration's plan -- which is to say, the plan Trump said was a failure -- and the New York Times reported in March that, with limited exceptions, Trump administration officials showed little interest in abandoning Obama's strategy.

With the "new" plan nearly complete, the Washington Post reports today that the coming policy looks an awful lot like the old policy.

The Pentagon is putting the final touches on a promised new counter-Islamic State strategy for Syria and Iraq, and it looks very much like the one the Obama administration pursued, according to senior defense officials.

As Retired Admiral James Stavridis, an NBC News analyst, put it a few months ago, "The current plan to defeat the Islamic State is just like that old saying: Plan B is just, 'Try harder at Plan A.'"

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Donald Trump picks a fight over Medicaid he cannot win

At a White House event yesterday, a reporter asked Donald Trump to comment on the Medicaid cuts in the Republican health care bill. "It's going to great," the president replied. "This will be great for everybody."

As a rule, "everybody" is a word Trump should probably avoid. He did, after all, promise Americans, "We're going to have insurance for everybody" -- which is a commitment he abandoned soon after taking office.

Nevertheless, Trump's clumsy comments yesterday about the underlying issue is part of a broader area of concern for Republicans. Their plan intends to gut Medicaid -- a popular program that covers more Americans than any other program -- by hundreds of billions of dollars. The GOP response so far has been to insist that Medicaid cuts aren't actually Medicaid cuts. As USA Today noted, Trump joined the chorus last night.

President Trump accused Democrats of lying about the projected Medicaid cuts in the Republican health care plan, but they didn't. They're just counting different things.

As Senate leadership struggles to find on a way forward for the controversial health care plan after coming up short of the votes it needed to pass before July 4 recess, Trump defended the proposal, tweeting that "Democrats purposely misstated Medicaid under new Senate bill - actually goes up."

Yes, this is the line Republicans have decided to stick to: it only looks like they're cutting Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars, but that's a ruse concocted by those rascally Democrats.

In reality, of course, it's not just Dems who've raised concerns about the Medicaid cuts; plenty of prominent Republicans, including Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.), have echoed the point.

But more importantly, a semantics debate about the meaning of the word "cut" is ridiculous, even by 2017 standards.

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