August 12, 2017, It never f***ing ends
In Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacists (including the Ku Klux Klan) were protesting the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, a vehicle plowed into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing at least one and injuring at least nineteen.
The Governor of Virginia had declared a state of emergency, and even Il Douché the President tweeted something on the subject, without, of course, mentioning his base those actually responsible for the violence, i.e. the White supremacists themselves, or the specific incident.
It took please God our next President Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah (#PresidentHatch) to actually condemn the violence.
It is not without irony that I have just returned from a week long visit to Hungary, a fascinating and beautiful country, but one with its own troubled history of fascism (and whose hard-right anti-immigrant leader Viktor Orban was actually among the first-- and the first EU leader- to congratulate Il Douché the President on his electoral victory.) I understand Big Boss Vladimir Russian leader Vladimir Putin will actually be visiting Hungary for the second time this year later in August.
Alrightie then. If we couldn't do so before, we can now officially say that there is now a body-count to the President's overt racism (which, after all, got him "elected" in the first place, assuming you accept the sadly bipartisan, but ever more unlikely narrative that actual voting machines and tallies weren't hacked). We can only say that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's work now takes on a new urgency (even assuming that the President's amateurish and ill-advised tit for tat posturing with nuclear armed North Korea doesn't get us all killed).
We have completed what has probably been the longest six-months in American history (even as shockingly little apparently happened, while what we have come to believe was a functioning government is quietly being dismantled affirmatively or otherwise suffering rather malign neglect in front of us, and our nation's standing in the world deteriorates perhaps more rapidly.)
Is this the start of the race-war that Mr. Trump and his supporters have been trying to bait now since long before the election? We can only hope that calmer heads prevail (and strangely, we have to hope that one of those calmer heads belongs to Kim Jong Un.)
The old Chinese curse has clearly come true for us: we live in interesting times.