Pathological Liar Donald Trump Has A Lot Of Gall Calling Other People Dishonest

One of the unique characteristics of Donald Trump’s “reality TV” candidacy is his predilection for coining derogatory nicknames for his rivals. It’s a particularly childish habit that exemplifies the stunted emotional growth of a snotty elementary school bully. He has used this smarmy tactic against “Little” Marco Rubio, “Lyin'” Ted Cruz, “Crazy” Megyn Kelly, “Crooked” Hillary Clinton, and others. In most cases it can be better explained as projection of his own character flaws.

Donald Trump Tweet

Yesterday Trump tweeted another of his petulant insults that have become the hallmark of his campaign to malign the presidency (he says he may start “acting” presidential soon). This one was directed at Hillary Clinton and said…

“Crooked Hillary Clinton, perhaps the most dishonest person to have ever run for the presidency.”

Coming from Donald Trump this is nearly hysterical. Virtually everything that comes out of his mouth is either painfully ignorant, grossly insulting, or demonstrably false. News Corpse has been collecting Trump’s voluminous anthology of untruths in the Trump Bullshitopedia, an ever-expanding catalog of his lies.

The media watchdogs at PolitiFact have also been scoring the presidential candidates. What they found is that 76% of the statements they rated by Trump were false in some degree. That includes twenty-four statements they called “Pants on Fire” lies. Only three, out of 134 of Trump’s statements, were rated as true.

Hillary Clinton’s score, on the other hand, was the mirror opposite of Trump’s. She had 71% of her statements rated as true. So the hypocrisy of Trump is not incidental. It’s delusional. Clinton, whatever her faults, is far and away more honest than Trump. But that doesn’t stop Trump from arbitrarily slandering her. In fact, it’s perfectly in character for Trump to lie about the honesty of others.

PolitiFact Trump Clinton

For good measure, Trump added another slight to Clinton in the same tweet saying that she is “one of the all time great enablers.” That is a thinly disguised reference he has been using to try to reignite the Bill Clinton sex scandals of the nineties. Beside that being a lame overreach into past irrelevancies, it is also a dangerous path to tread for a man who wants to bang his own daughter.


How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.


The World Is Coming To An End – Well, Just Glenn Beck’s World

This week marked a milestone in the history of the human race. Apparently it is not long for this world – again. This time the prophet predicting the End Times is Glenn Beck – again.

Glenn Beck Messiah

On his video blog, Beck pleaded with his disciples to stand strong in support of Ted Cruz, the candidate who Beck believes is America’s savior. Never mind that he renounced any association with the Republican Party a year ago saying that “I have made my decision. I am out. I am not a Republican,” because they “have the spine of a worm, the ethics of whores, and the integrity of pirates.” That seemed like a good call. Too bad he couldn’t stick to it.

Beck acknowledges that things may look dark for Cruz, but that this isn’t the time to lose faith. He warns his listeners in Indiana that “the republic is at stake” and that “The election will hinge on you.” But that’s not all. It actually gets much worse as Beck frets that…

“This is the moment. If we drop it at this moment, we lose. And let me tell you something, you lose freedom for all mankind. I’m convinced of it. This is the moment.”

Of course, Beck has warned about an approaching Armageddon every other week for most of his of media career. However, this time he might actually have gotten it right. At least so far his own fate is concerned. TVNewser is reporting that Beck’s organization is laying off between 35 and 45 people from his operations in New York, Los Angeles, Ohio. and Washington, D.C. This latest wielding of the ax comes only a few days after the resignation of the CEO of Beck’s TheBlaze website, which itself followed a torrent of departures amid much corporate melodrama.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Beck’s problems are not new. News Corpse reported in 2013 that Beck was struggling to keep his media company afloat. He submitted a filing to the SEC seeking $40 million dollars in funding for TheBlaze. This was after he declared that he would never accept outside sources of funding because “I do not want to have to answer to anyone else.” Apparently looming bankruptcy softened his commitment to that principle. To date Beck has received only $6.4 million of the $40 million he sought. Not surprisingly, Beck is blaming his financial woes on everyone but himself.

“I trusted the people that ran my company that they wanted the same things […] Even though the managers were all saying the right things to me, those things were never getting done. I didn’t know who really got the vision – who got it and who didn’t. These people were my friends, they were my partners [but] they didn’t love the audience like I did.”

If only everyone had the capacity to love that Beck has. Then his businesses would not be failing. But even more importantly, God would not be preparing to destroy mankind because Republicans in America don’t have enough love for Ted Cruz, the most hated man in Washington. It’s hard to imagine that for all this time the fate of the world has rested on its reverence for and attentiveness to Glenn Beck. 😉

Bizarro World: Now The Republican Candidates Are Blasting Fox News More Than Democrats

One of the most enduring and annoying characteristics of the Fox News personality is that they are quick to take offense at any criticism and express their inner pain whenever they feel the least bit insulted. They have a defense mechanism that is on a hair trigger. If you have a legitimate complaint about the network you can expect them to fire back with ferocity.

Barack Obama Fox News

When Jon Stewart was on The Daily Show, Fox News regularly went into hysterics over his comic swipes at them. Never mind that his barbs were often aimed at Democrats and liberals as well, the ones targeting Fox brought out their full armory of wrath. And if President Obama dares to make a perfectly reasonable observation that Fox News has been biased against him, Fox reacts as if they were pierced with a presidential harpoon. They cry like babies every time Obama knocks them, even if it’s just in passing and in concert with a knock on the left.

However, they have yet to show the same indignation when their comrades on the right throw mud at the network. They seem to have a special store of umbrage that’s reserved only for Democrats who hurt their tender feelings.

For several months now Donald Trump has been wailing at Fox News for being boring, dopey, dishonest, unfair fools and clowns. He has directed his insults specifically toward featured Foxies like Bill O’Reilly, Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Karl Rove, and especially Megyn Kelly. He has sabotaged their debates by refusing to participate and has even advocated boycotting the network.

Now Ted Cruz is also slamming Fox News. In a press conference last week he complained that Fox has been unfair to him as it obsesses over Trump. He actually has a point. Fox has given Trump far more air time than any candidate of either party. And they have also given Trump more airtime than any other network has given him. Still, it generally doesn’t matter to Fox if the incoming criticism is true or not. They usually fire back with everything they’ve got.

So we now find ourselves in the odd position of seeing the top Republican candidates for president both bashing Fox News, the top media mouthpiece for Republicans. You know you have really crossed over into weird territory when right-wing politicians are the most prominent protesters of a media platform that has paved the way for their candidacies. Where will this leave Fox after the election?

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

What’s peculiar is that Fox has not been returning fire at the Republican candidates. With the exception of one response to Trump’s “sick obsession” with Megyn Kelly, the GOP offenders are being given a pass to hammer away at Fox. For a network that is notorious for brutal and rapid responses to critics, this can only be seen as a gift to the GOP. Liberal critics like Stewart or Bernie Sanders or Rachel Maddow had better take cover before delivering uncomplimentary comments. And President Obama should prepare for a nuclear blast. Fox is all for free speech as long as it doesn’t contain any criticism of their blatantly dishonest propaganda. Unless that criticism is coming from their ideological pals.

Fox News Anchor Pitches ‘Fair And Balanced’ Nonsense To Stephen Colbert

There is a measure of self-delusion that infects the natives at Fox News and prevents them from making the most obvious appraisals of reality. What else could explain why, after twenty years of shoveling right-wing propaganda down the throats of American cable news viewers, the network’s anchors persist in pushing the absurdity that Fox engages in anything resembling journalism?

Fox News

The host of Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace, appeared on Late Night with Stephen Colbert last night (video below) and once again demonstrated an acute case of a personality disorder that obstructs him from recognizing the truth about himself and his job. Colbert asked him what ought to have been a simple question, but he was unable to answer accurately or honestly.

Colbert: Rightly or wrongly Fox News is generally perceived to be the Republican news network. I know Fox News Sunday is on Fox Broadcasting, but you’re also on Fox News Channel. Do you think it’s fair to call Fox News a conservative broadcasting network?
Wallace: No. Look, there are obviously, in prime time, there are some shows, the opinion shows — Hannity, O’Reilly — that are conservative, no question about it. But we think that there’s a firewall between the opinion shows and hard news.

Wallace is continuing to advance the fallacy that only a couple of shows in primetime have partisan agendas, and everything else is straight up, unbiased reporting. He actually uses the phrase “We commit journalism every day,” as if it were a crime. You have to wonder if he is just deliberately lying or if he has ever watched the network.

There are three hours every morning that are hosted by folks like Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade, Tucker Carlson, Anna Kooiman, etc., who are rabidly right-wing and viciously anti-Democrat. They regularly feature such ultra-conservative guests as Andrew Napolitano, Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton, and Donald Trump had a scheduled Monday morning segment for several years.

That’s followed by Outnumbered, a program name meant to refer to the four female hosts who invite a single male guest. But it really refers to the whole panel generally being comprised of only conservatives (with an occasional pseudo-liberal punching bag). Then there is the Real Story with Gretchen Carlson, who was promoted to that slot from her prior seat on the Fox & Friends curvy couch. A little later in the day is Your World with Neil Cavuto. It would be interesting to see if Wallace thinks that Cavuto is a neutral journalist as he berates and interrupts his liberal guests and cozies up to wingnut Republicans from Congress and business. After Cavuto is The Five, a program hosted by four hard-core right-wingers and one rotating Fox version of a lefty.

That’s seven hours of daytime programming that is unambiguously conservative. So where Wallace gets the notion that it’s only in primetime that opinions are expressed is a mystery. But he is insistent that his network trades in legitimate journalism. He went to have this exchange with Colbert:

Colbert: So there’s no sense of chaos as to what the unified message would be, or the narrative that’s being created by the network. There’s never any sense of like, this is what we’re gonna be talking about today or this is the take we’re gonna have on a story?
Wallace: I know there’s this narrative out there that there’s this talking points we have to all follow. It’s bull.

Of course, the truth has long been known that Fox CEO Roger Ailes distributes a “morning memo” everyday that does exactly what Colbert said with regard to a unified message. It would almost be worse if there weren’t. Because that would mean that everybody on the network just spontaneously said all the same things, with the same spin, without any coordination. It would mean they were all manufactured on the same assembly line of right-wing mouthpieces with the same hate-speech chips inserted.

That’s a pretty scary thought. But no scarier than the fact that Fox News just happened to have created conservative stalwarts like Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and many other others. Have they ever launched a liberal icon of the sort? Of course not, and that isn’t an accident. So Wallace might want to watch a few hours of Fox and see if he can plausibly defend the network and its obvious rightward bent.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

The Trump Cult Marches On As His Disciples Obey Their Master’s Call

The latest round of Republican primaries has returned the results that pretty much everyone expected. Donald Trump prevailed in the northeast corridor over his hapless GOP rivals who are only competing to challenge Trump at an open convention in July. The fact that Trump continues to pull out victories like this is evidence of how low the Republican Party has sunk into blind obedience to the overlord of reality TV celebrity worship. It’s behavior that they have learned faithfully from being loyal devotees of Fox News for so many years.

Fox Nation vs. Reality

Trump’s disciples don’t care that he is a flagrant racist who has demonstrated his prejudice against African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, and women. They aren’t put off by his promises to commit war crimes against women and children in Syria and Iraq. They let slide that he isn’t bothered by being compared to Hitler. And no matter how much he lies they just brush it off and keep applauding like slap-happy seals (See the Trump Bullshitopedia) They even applaud when he insults them as mindless baboons or threatens to incite riots.

It is that sort of unquestioning devotion that forms the foundation of every successful cult. And those components were built into Fox News from its inception. In an effort to document this phenomenon, News Corpse published a collection of articles that highlighted the deception, propaganda, and outright lies disseminated by the Fox News community website, Fox Nation. The second volume of this series was dubbed “Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult Of Ignorance.” Every chapter is fully verified by reputable sources and exposes the website for its shameful dishonesty and lack of ethics. It reveals the concerted effort by wealthy and powerful media fabulists that is aimed at crippling the intelligence of the willfully dimwitted. It is a great resource for proving to your Fox-deluded friends and family what a den of deceit it is. Here is an excerpt from the introduction:

“Since then Fox Nation has evolved into an even more sheltered environment that has taken on many characteristics of culthood. It is a pattern they adopted from their parent, Fox News, where the slogan “fair and balanced” was an implicit condemnation of all other news sources as being neither. Recognizing that the prime directive of a cult is to convince your followers that your version of reality is the only true version and that all others are agents of deception, Fox segregated their disciples to prevent them from being contaminated by impure thoughts, otherwise known as facts.”

Stay to to News Corpse for more insights into the media and its incestuous intersection with politics. Be sure to like us on Facebook. And here is where you can get your copy of Fox Nation vs. Reality:

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.


Rush Limbaugh Warns Of “A Nuclear Explosion” If Donald Trump Is Denied Nomination

Conservative pundits on TV and radio have proven to be painfully bad at punditry. Their predictions are notoriously distant from the reality that eventually unfolds. Just think about all of the things that were supposed to either destroy America, or turn it into a commie hellhole, if Barack Obama was elected (or reelected), that never came to pass. But there is one thing at which they are quite good: Scaring the bejeebus out of the wingnut faithful.

Rush Limbaugh

So it is unsurprising that the monster-mouth of the right, Rush Limbaugh, is unleashing alarms over the prospect of the Republicans being thrust into a contested convention. The threat, as imagined by Limbaugh, is that disappointed Trump supporters will freak out if their messiah is not crowned by an obedient assembly of delegates. Limbaugh speculates about a scenario wherein Ted Cruz manages to maneuver the delegate vote to a second or third ballot and then prevail over Trump. In which case, Limbaugh warns

“If that ever happens, we are gonna see a nuclear explosion like you’ve never seen before. […] Holy smokes! The blowback that will happen then, the backlash? That will be the end of the Republican Party. […] It might make the Watts and Rodney King riots look like Romper Room when it was all over.”

This isn’t the first time that Limbaugh has presaged the end of the Republican Party. Two months before President Obama was reelected in 2012 Limbaugh said that “If Obama wins let me tell you what it’s the end of…the Republican Party.” Sadly, this was just another of the hundreds of times he’s been wrong. And during the same rant he was equally wrong when he said that…

“If Obama’s re-elected, it will happen. There’s no IF about this. And it’s gonna be ugly. It’s gonna be gut-wrenching, but it will happen. The country’s economy is going to collapse if Obama is re-elected.”

At some point you have to wonder if he is ever embarrassed by his perpetual idiocy. But back to the main point, this new spiel is just the latest threat of violence projected for the Republican National Convention coming up in Cleveland in July. Trump himself predicted riots if he arrived at the convention with more delegates than his opponents, but short of a majority, and was beaten out of the nomination by a better organized candidate. His stooge, Roger Stone, publicly declared that he would be distributing the names and hotel room numbers of delegates that didn’t fall in line behind Trump.

Limbaugh’s warning came with a caveat that if Cruz or Kasich or anyone else rose to assume the nomination it would not be due to, as Trump whines, a rigged system or someone stealing the election:

“It’s not because anything’s illegal. Everybody’s taking advantage of the rules. [but] The words would not be there to explain to people what happened […] and people wouldn’t put up with it.”

So even Limbaugh accepts that it is within the rules to lobby for delegate support and make a case to nominate someone other than the top delegate winner. But at the same time he reveals his opinion that his fellow Republicans are unable to understand the process and that they are too dense for it to be explained to them, leading to them resorting to mayhem.

What’s funny about this is that Limbaugh is so upset by the possibility of riots ensuing at the GOP convention. However, he had a completely different view a few years ago when he openly advocated for violence at the Democratic convention in Denver in 2008 in a tirade he titled Screw the World! Riot in Denver! he said that his dream was for…

“…a replay of Chicago 1968, with burning cars, protests, fires, literal riots, and all of that.”

So while Limbaugh had such fervent hopes for violence that never materialized (or was even plausible) at a Democratic convention, he is now fraught with anxiety about the potential for violence at a Republican convention. There’s a kind of karmic justice in that. It is also typical of right-wingers who so often use projection to disparage their perceived enemies, but later find themselves the victims of their own evil yearnings.

More Proof That Donald Trump Thinks (Correctly) That His Followers Are Imbeciles

A few months ago News Corpse published an article illustrating the disrespect that Donald Trump has for his legions of dimwitted followers. His open contempt for the little people that flock to his hate-filled revival meetings was expressed in a Q&A with a supporter who wanted to know how Trump would handle terrorism. Trump responded that “You don’t want to hear how I’d handle it.” Of course they don’t. They’re too dumb to understand a substantive answer, even if Trump were smart enough to give one.

Donald Trump

This morning Trump demonstrated how he is changing his image to be more “presidential” by railing against John Kasich for the disgusting way he eats pancakes. That’s the depth of the discourse on issues that Trump is capable of, and it perfectly reflects the intellectual capacity of his audience. And Trump knows it. That’s why he said the following this weekend:

“You know, being presidential is easy — much easier than what I have to do. Here, I have to rant and rave. I have to keep you people going. Otherwise you’re going to fall asleep on me, right?”

Right! Trump is acknowledging that his supporters are low attention span blockheads who can’t concentrate unless they are being subjected to the neanderthal ranting and raving that is the hallmark of a Trump rally. But what’s truly pathetic is that they cheer him even while he’s insulting them as shallow peons who require vulgar stimulation to remain awake. It’s a perverse sort of political masochism that excites Trump’s submissives as well as the dominant, dictatorial tendencies of Trump.

For the record, if it were easy for Trump to be presidential he would not have spent the last ten months insulting women, African-Americans, Muslims, and his GOP colleagues. He would not have brazenly lied more than any candidate in modern history (see the Trump Bullshitopedia). And he would not have repeatedly embarrassed himself by acting like a buffoon and affirming the most repulsive behavior of the past few decades, including that he wants to bang his daughter.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

The fact that an elitist, narcissistic, billionaire, born into wealth and privilege, inspires such demented reverence on the part of his lowbrow, glassy-eyed disciples is a troubling sign for the Republican Party. The frightening thing is that the rest of the Republican field is jockeying to attract these same cretins. So regardless of what happens to Trump, the GOP constituency will remain infected by his diseased mindset and the party regulars will have adopted his crackpot platform. That’s a stain that will be hard to wash away.

Really? Fox News Debuts The Anti-Climate Change Armadillo

In its continuing effort to disinform its viewers on the indisputably real threat of climate change (as documented by 97% of the scientists who study it), Fox News invited the notorious climate denier, Marc Morano, to deliver one of the most absurd and dishonest arguments against the facts to date (and to plug his new propaganda film).

Fox News

On Fox & Friends Sunday morning, host Steve Doocy introduced Morano as an expert on climate science and took a swing at President Obama in the process (video below):

Doocy: The Obama administration bypassed Congress and signed a U.N. treaty on climate change. But many hailing the decision are the same people who swore doomsday was upon us decades ago and many of those scenarios never came true.

First of all, Doocy’s assertion that the Obama administration bypassed Congress is the sort of deliberate falsehood that Fox uses to smear the President as an out of control tyrant. In reality, the “Paris Agreement,” signed by Secretary of State John Kerry, was part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a treaty that was ratified by the Senate in 1992. The Congress has no role whatsoever in the follow-on agreements to a treaty already ratified.

Secondly, Doocy’s contention that those supporting the Paris Agreement had made prior warnings that never materialized is also false. For one thing, he provides no names to back up his claim. And virtually everything that has been warned about climate change has, in fact, come to pass. 2015 was the hottest year on record, and 2016 is already poised to surpass that.

But what made this segment remarkable was the absurdity of how the argument was presented. Morano brought in a stuffed armadillo, in a cage for safety (?), to illustrate his fairy tale that the beleaguered beast was burdened by global cooling in the seventies and warming today. Once again, no evidence was provided to support the claim that “We were worried about a coming ice age” in the 70s. However, the global cooling fallacy has long been used by climate deniers, even though it was based on a single magazine article and was never advanced by anyone in the science community.

For the record, Morano has been lying about climate for several years despite the fact that he has no background at all in science. Just like Sarah Palin, who recently bragged that she is “as much a scientist” as Bill Nye (which is demonstrably untrue), Morano is as much a scientist as Palin.

Morano began his career as a Republican operative who worked for the Senate’s stupidest climate denier, Jim Inhofe. Morano’s resume also includes stints with Rush Limbaugh, the ultra-conservative CNSNews, and he was one of the original “swiftboat” liars who smeared Kerry’s service as a Vietnam veteran. He has a purely political past that in no way prepares him to comment on climate science. And with today’s partnership with a stuffed armadillo, Morano continues to turn an important issue into the sort of silliness that a Fox News viewer can understand, never mind that it is completely untrue.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Republicans Are Frantically Trying To Force Themselves To Believe Donald Trump’s Lies

What’s happening today in the Republican primary for the GOP nomination for president is unprecedented. The front-runner in the race is purposefully lying about himself and admitting that he is lying. When Donald Trump says that “At some point, I’m going to be so presidential that you people will be so bored,” he is in effect confessing that everything he has been doing up until that point has been a charade.

Dogshit Donald Trump

This isn’t the first time that Trump has openly revealed the dishonesty of his campaign tactics. He was asked by Fox News in February when he would start to act more presidential and he answered “Pretty soon.” Of course, that answer was evidence that he was not presidential at the time, but that his “act” would change at some unspecified time in the future. So as soon as he thinks he’s ready to stop acting like a crass and boorish buffoon he’ll suddenly transform into a respectable diplomat, something he has never been in decades of a very public life.

To expand on his overt phoniness, Trump also told an NBC town hall that “I did some things, and I’ve said some things in fun. I’ve said it as an entertainer.” He apparently has no reluctance to exposing himself as character in his own reality show. And his new campaign chief, Paul Manafort, backed him up saying that “The part that he’s been playing is now evolving.”

So it’s obvious, and admitted, that Trump is merely playing a part at his rancorous rallies filled with rancid insults, undisguised threats, crybaby whining, and childish blathering. And now he expects everyone to believe that he will simply change into a dignified leader who won’t embarrass the nation on the world stage. That’s a lot to ask. But sadly, many in the media are already falling for it.

In a addition to the press, who have forthrightly stated that ratings are more important than the welfare of the country, the Republican Party is trying to gather the nerve to pretend that they can tolerate a Trump candidacy. While some factions of the GOP are stumbling over themselves to resist him (i.e. the #NeverTrump movement), the remainder are engaging in a form of self-delusion to get to a point where they don’t vomit at the sound his name.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

They realize that July is rapidly approaching and the prospect of Trump emerging from their convention with the nomination is not as preposterous as it once seemed to be. Now they have to decide whether it would be crazier to step away from a candidate that has sunk to lower depths in favorability than any candidate in history, or to fall in line behind him and suffer record losses. They also have to decide if they want to be associated with a flaming bigot who revels in his ignorance of both domestic and foreign affairs.

That might seem like an easy question for most people, but for Republicans they are struggling with it. The choice between integrity and patriotism over a racist wannabe dictator is not so simple for them. And if you were going to place any bets, I would suggest that you lean toward the party standing behind Trump because, when all is said and done, he isn’t so different than the rest of them. And he certainly isn’t very different from the right-wing constituency that is propping Trump up with victories from Montgomery to Manhattan.

That’s A Wrap: Hollywood’s Closet Conservatives Close Their Covert Club

For those who haven’t heard of it, the Friends of Abe (FoA) is an exclusive society of right-wing celebrities who pretend to be secret so as to protect themselves from imaginary discrimination in Hollywood. Never mind that many of them make public appearances on behalf of the supposedly secret group and with names like Kelsey Grammer, Tom Selleck, Bruce Willis, and Clint Eastwood, they aren’t exactly nobodies who can’t find work in movies and TV.

Friends of Abe

Now it appears that the FoA is being disbanded. A report by the Guardian reveals that the organization has decided to dispense with their activities just as the 2016 election season is heading into the homestretch. The networking group will cease to host regular gatherings where they can complain about their careers, bitch about high taxes on rich folks like themselves, fret about ISIS coming after them, hate on immigrants, whine that more Americans have access to health care than ever before, and blame President Obama for those, and every other, catastrophe they think is destroying America. The announcement was made in an email to members that said in part…

“Effective immediately, we are going to begin to wind down the 501 c3 organization, bring the Sustaining Membership dues to an end, and do away with the costly infrastructure and the abespal.com website. Today, because we have been successful in creating a community that extends far beyond our events, people just don’t feel as much of a need to show up for every speaker or bar night, and fewer people pay the dues that help us maintain that large infrastructure.”

That’s some pretty powerful spin. Did you catch it? They are saying that due to their unparalleled success nobody is paying any dues or showing up for their events. And to think, I used to believe that declining revenue and attendance were signs of failure. Shows you how much I know.

As it turns out, the FoA is suffering from the same sort of internal rancor that is devouring the Republican Party from the inside, and for the same reason: Donald Trump. As the Guardian notes, “infighting over Donald Trump’s candidacy, among other factors, had drained commitment.” It goes on to expose an environment described by one the founders as a “civil war in slow motion,” and laments broken friendships and the loss of a sense of solidarity.

Trump basks in the glory of being a wrecking ball on the right. He has splintered the GOP into factions including the #NeverTrump movement and the well-financed anti-Trump “Our Principles” Super PAC. Party regulars have likened the emergence of Trump to political suicide, or at least threatened to commit suicide themselves if he gets the nomination. As for the Storm-Trumpers, they cling so tightly to their messiah that they promise to wreak havoc at the RNC convention and abandon the GOP entirely if the crown is not passed to Trump as God intends.

Even Fox News has been run through the Trump meat grinder. He has bitterly castigated the network as being full of dopes, and dummies, and boring lightweights who can’t function because of their menstrual cycles. He has even called for a boycott of the network that he says is totally unfair to him, despite the fact that they have given him far more airtime than any other candidate. The same animosities that drove the break up of the FoA can be observed in the hallways of Fox News.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

But don’t jump to conclusions yet. This announcement of defeat may be a ruse to throw everyone off the trail of the FoA’s true mission. They may just be pretending to break up so they can return to their former state of obscurity from which they can launch wingnut missiles at Democrats and other liberal foes in anonymity. Yesterday they posted a message on their Facebook page that cryptically presaged this announcement:

“Friends of Abe mentioned in the media again…sheesh, we’re becoming about as ‘secret’ as Mount Everest. I will concede that the author is correct, in that sides have certainly been drawn regarding Trump. But the organization will survive, even if, for the time being, fewer people are being let in.”

That sounds like a tactical retreat. Not that they would be any more effective as guerrilla-style activists fighting in the shadows. Having twice the impact of zero impact is still zero impact. We’ll know more shortly as the FoA Facebook page currently has a cover photo that says they will release an official statement on the Facebook page in the next twenty-fours. Maybe that statement will include an explanation for why an organization whose first rule is (borrowing from The Fight Club) “Never talk about Friends of Abe,” has a Facebook page to begin with.