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Very often, I see my liberal Facebook friends posting about Trump’s latest outrage and I click over to see, and think “Well, they were exaggerating that one a bit.”  Partly that’s because  we all tend to exaggerate to make our point and partly it’s because we are almost immune to Trump doing and saying stupid things.  He is a stupid man, after all.
Well, I thought it would be like that when I saw people posting “Trump totally LOSES it at press conference,” especially as that’s one phrase I  think is overused.  I see ‘totally loses it’ in the teaser and think ‘eh, maybe said something uncool.’
But, no, he kind of lost it.  Lost the thread, gave up on any semblance of human decency.  Said there were some fine people at the Nazi rally in Charlottesville.  Said they weren’t all white supremacists, and they were viciously attacked by left wingers who didn’t have a permit.
I know that you can’t trust TV footage 100%, but there sure were a lot of Nazi flags there, and the Nazis are most famous for sending 8 million people to their deaths in concentration camps, and starting a war that killed 18 million.  They were not nice people, and anyone trying to revive their ideology is not a nice person.
Now, Trump has basically come out on their side.  The Nazi side.  If that’s not grounds for impeachment, we should make it so.

He also talked a lot  about infrastructure, and seemed to think the way to repair it is to remove all regulation.  Yeah, think about that next time you drive across a bridge.

If you are one of those reading my blog who prefers not to see bad language, skip to paragraph 2 and you’ll  still  get the gist of what I’m saying, but Trae Crowder (google him if you don’t know who I mean, or YouTube), the Liberal Redneck, is a seriously  funny guy.  “Saying you’re a patriotic American while you’re carrying a Nazi flag, or a Confederate flag, is like arguing against gay marriage with a dick in  your  mouth.”
Now, that’s a funny line.  Especially when delivered with an Appalachian accent.

Trae Crowder is a rarity among political comedians – he’s actually funny.   Unlike Jimmy Dore and Lee Camp, who  I like and listen to, but it’s mostly because I agree with their political views.  They seldom make me laugh out loud.
Looking back a few decades, they  remind me a lot of George Carlin.  Not the early George Carlin, where he did stand up on a variety of subjects and was great, like his Hippy-dippy weatherman routine, but the ones of the older, more bitter Carlin, which get posted to Facebook again and  again. Those are just political rants, and devoid of heartfelt belly laughs.  My Bernie friends all  love him.   The best I can say is I usually agree with him.

The world needs more laughs, and just reciting a litany of how messed up the world is and how ridiculous the opposition’s policies are is not humor.  There’s got to be a joke in there somewhere.  Trae Crowder’s got that.

There are 3 ways in which I think the mainstream media is missing the mark on the events in Charlottesville.  First, they are basically just talking about what happened and not talking nearly enough about the people involved.   I first glanced at Facebook at about 9 a.m. (Prague time, but it doesn’t matter.)  That’s where I learned the victim’s name.  Heather Heyer.  Anti-racist.  Paralegal. 32.  Quite pretty.  Last Facebook post “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”
I turned on  the T.V.  Alternating between BBC and CNN, it was about 3 in the afternoon (Prague time) before I heard them mention it.  Maybe they did, I don’t have proof of a blackout (or reason to  think there was one, except for general distrust of  the media), but it definitely was not their emphasis.

Second, their conflation of her death with those of the two cops who died in a helicopter crash, hours later, while observing the area.  Unless somebody shot the helicopter down, the two incidents are completely unrelated, yet I  heard one poor announcer on CNN, who was undoubtedly reading from a script, start a sentence with the car and end the very same sentence with ‘in  the helicopter crash.’  I got the  feeling even  she was embarrassed.
But both of those can be put down to sloppy editing, being in a hurry to  get the story out, and the inherent confusion of an ongoing, violent situation.
Where I really take exception is the way people are lambasting Trump’s statement.  Not that it doesn’t deserve to be lambasted.  What he said was “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.  It has been going on for a long time in our country — not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. It has been going on for a long, long time. It has no place in America.”
All of the pundits are angry with him for not specifically condemning the racist neo-Nazis who were responsible for the violence.  Eh.  He probably should have, but that’s  one  thing that bothered me about  so many of the criticisms of Obama.  The Republicans just kept shrieking that he didn’t use the word ‘terrorist’ enough, that his statements lacked the bellicosity she craved.
What bothered me was not what he didn’t say, but what he did.  “On many sides, on many sides.”  Bullshit.  The white supremacists showed up with guns, pepper spray and shields.  It was one of them driving the car.  Except for a few fistfights here and there, which require two participants and are very seldom fatal, 100% of the violence came from the racist’s side.
His statement was wrong, and it was designed to muddy the waters, and change the argument.  “Both sides do it.”  That’s what he was saying.
But both sides don’t.  That’s the reality.  I wish at least one of them would point that out.

I’m not going to write about the tragedy in Charlottesville tonight.  It’s too fresh and anything I type is likely to be more incoherent rage than logical observation.  So, I’ll  write about that in a day or two, after I’ve had time to  absorb it all, and we have more information.  At least one person  is dead, and I don’t want to jump in and  start shouting until we know more.
Today, I marched in the Gay Pride Parade.  To my discredit, this is the first one I’ve ever attended.  It was a fantastic atmosphere.  There were counter-protestors, with huge signs saying “The Czech Republic is not  Sodom” and “Stop Extremism” which I thought was a bit of  an oxymoron.  At any rate, impossible.  On any issue, or in any field of  human endeavor, there are going to be extreme positions.  There are also going to be moderate positions.  And several others, along the range.  Because there’s always a range.
Anyway, the counter protesters, despite their position right by the horse at the head of the square and their outsized signs, were absorbed by the body of the protest.  Partly just because of the numbers, partly because their signs just blended in with all the other signs (Cake Against Hate!) and partly because people, including many dressed in outlandish costumes, kept coming up to them and looking at their signs.   I suspect some even engaged them in conversation.

There were balloons, and floats, and people on  stilts, and music, and lots and lots of people wearing face paint and rainbow colored clothing but I didn’t feel out  of place in just jeans and a t-shirt.  It was a friendly, casual atmosphere.
There was also a bit of street theater.  I don’t know if you could call them furries, because it was more  leather, but a bunch of guys dressed up like animals, a dog being led around on a leash, a rabbit.  It was all very entertaining.

I plan on doing it again next year.  Gay people know how to put on a party, no  doubt about that.

Oh, this is turning into the laziest summer ever, and I’m kind of enjoying that behind the guilt of not getting any  of the things done that I should  be getting done.  It was raining in the morning when I got up and it poured and poured and that always clears the air and lowers the pressure, especially as this is the  most oppressively hot summer I’ve ever seen in Prague.
I read a lot, two books simultaneously, I’ll maybe finish them both this weekend.  One is by a friend of mine, one is by a famous writer, but there are a lot of  similarities between them.  Secret lives, a bit of the supernatural, prophecies and curses.
Isabel made pancakes for breakfast, I made leftovers for lunch (the chicken nuggets in blue cheese that Isabel had made for dinner a couple of days ago), spent a fair bit of time on facebook, my Berniecrats group has a saboteur or two, and at least one of them seems to be among the admins, so that’s a problem.  But, the way I see it, it’s a group with more than 50,000 members, who are all  on the same track, the same page, who all have close enough to the same mindset that a saboteur or two isn’t going to change much.

Then, met a couple of friends who are visiting Prague and had a great conversation about bygone days, but there were some names and incidents I didn’t remember, that was my last year of drinking, and a great deal of  it was spent in an alcoholic fog, then politics came  up and you’ve never seen anything escalate so fast.  They were totally convinced Hillary lost because she was a woman.
Still, even though she said I (all who didn’t vote for Hillary) was directly responsible for Trump, somehow we managed to change the subject back to more neutral topics, she did a comedy, magic act which got a laugh out of everybody and, all in all, it was a lovely afternoon.