Carly Fiorina got $600,000 from the NRA but apparently she still has to wear jackets made out of curtains like a Carol Burnett character.
Carly Fiorina got $600,000 from the NRA but apparently she still has to wear jackets made out of curtains, like a Carol Burnett character. Rich Koele / Shutterstock.com

Obama's last few months in office seem to be characterized by a wave of IDGAF that oscillates from laid-back to bad-ass: Last week he kicked back with Jerry Seinfeld, this week he's getting ready to finally do something about all those fucking guns.

We don't know what Obama's going to propose. It's possible he doesn't exactly know yet. He's meeting with the FBI and ATF today to talk options; and then the plan is to announce something in the next day or two, at which point Republicans will all have to speak out against it to justify their NRA paychecks.

But because we live in strange times, the loudest rhetoric is coming (as always) from the one candidate who doesn't need the NRA's money: Donald Trump. He just needs their supporters.

"Well pretty soon, you won’t be able to get guns," he told CNN, which like everything he says isn't true, but hey whatever. Instead of signing legislation, Trump insisted, Obama should be "negotiating." Not sure if Donald's familiar with the United States of America, but we've been trying that approach for awhile and it doesn't seem to be working.

The other candidates have fallen in line behind their NRA bosses quickly enough.

It only cost the NRA $2,000 to get Paul Ryan to call Obama's tactics "executive overreach." Ryan pointed out that gun control was floated and rejected by Congress in 2013, after a gunman massacred a bunch of children.

Marco Rubio, whose campaign got a $5,000 payout from the NRA, said that the latest round of gun control would only affect "law-abiding citizens, not the criminals or terrorists who target them." That particular NRA talking point is insane in this context, to the point that we can't even give Marco the benefit of presuming he really believes it to be true. Remember, we don't even know what Obama's going to do yet. And somehow Marco Rubio has peered into the future to see what nobody else can?

Carly Fiorina is annoyed that we're even talking about guns at all. "It is delusional, dangerous, not to mention unconstitutional," she said, "for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to continue talking about climate change and gun control in the wake of a Paris terrorist attack, in the wake of a San Bernardino terrorist attack, instead of how we can defeat ISIS."

Unconstitutional! To be talking about it! Carly, by the way, got $600,000 from the NRA for her failed Senate run.

Jeb, who's still running for something (president? Really? Okay, if you say so) told Fox News that Obama's "first impulse is always to take rights away from law-abiding citizens." Bush, you'll recall, signed Florida's shoot-first law in 2005, with a gun lobbyist literally standing right next to him. The NRA had at that point twice donated the maximum amount to Bush's campaigns, plus $55,000 to the Florida Republican Party.

"If he wants to make changes these laws, go to Congress and convince the Congress that they're necessary," demanded Chris Christie, as if Congress is convinced by anything other than money. I guess if he really wanted to, Obama could get into a bidding war with the NRA, offering to match whatever gun lobbyists promise Republicans.

Christie went on to criticize the use of executive actions, then promised to use executive actions to undo whatever Obama proposes "when I become President." Nothing about that scenario makes any sense, but it doesn't have to as long as the checks keep clearing.