Gaffing, Again

APPARENTLY, IT REALLY HAPPENED. Apparently, he really said it. President Trump, in front of God, world, and millions of Americans, celebrated American independence by saying that during the revolutionary war, the continental army seized control of airports, which theretofore had presumably been in British hands. Implied is that by so doing, the British were deprived of refueling stations for their bombers, which saved the towns of colonial America from constant bombardment. It could have been worse. It could always be worse, though often its hard to imagine how. He could have turned the holiday celebration into another one of his tiresome, grotesque campaign style rallies, laden with insult slinging and outlandish distortions of fact, angry chanting faces wearing MAGA ball caps. Instead, yielding to immense public pressure, he kept it patriotic, with the airport remark thrown in for good measure. The president, it seems, is, as usual, quite confused, unaware of basic historical facts. His excuse is that it was raining, and the teleprompter did him an injustice. Trump and his gangsterish minions used to carp at Obama for having the audacity to use a teleprompter at all. At least nobody in his gang has accused the liberal elite, or China, of conspiring to abuse the teleprompter by feeding it misinformation or fake news. Exactly how the rain and the teleprompter prevented the president from knowing what words were coming out of his mouth and effectively aborting their emergence nobody is explaining. Amid speculation that Trump truly believes that aviation science was extant in the eighteenth century, we are reminded that this wasn't the first time. When the president suggested that windmills cause cancer, he offered no retraction later, made no attempt to blame it on the weather, or malfunctioning electronic equipment. Evidently, to this day, he still maintains his belief in the carcinogenic qualities of windmills. then there was the one in which Trump declared that his father, Fred Trump the slum lord, was born in Germany. Either he had his father confused with his grandfather, or just wanted to portray himself as the scion of an immigrant from a country which is not a shit hole, or just doesn't give a shit The total number of outright lies told as president has now nearly reached eleven thousand, all well documented, all widely witnessed. There appears to be no exact accounting of the merely outrageously stupid remarks. Saying things like American revolutionary war forces seized control of airports in the seventeen seventies cannot be counted as "lies", so much as outbursts of latent schizophrenia. The best strategy for Trump supporters will be their usual one; to just ignore the remark, ignore the ridicule engendered by it, and pretend it didn't happen, and go about their merry, angry, racist, misogynistic, self proclaimed Christian devilish ways. And this is exactly what they will do, while the rest of us, the astonished majority, fairly and appropriately incessantly ridicule their seriously mentally ill leader. It must become embarrassing to be a Trump supporter, even if the embarrassment is neatly hidden beneath misinformation, deflected blame, and insults hurled at people whose actions are irrelevant. I've given up travelling abroad; it has long since become embarrassing being an American.