I would have said he embarrassed himself but if you’re reporting on butt-sex for ThinkProgress that train has already left the station at a high rate of speed.

Last night, President Trump held a rally in Cincinnati, OH, and the lefties were out in to pick nits and “fact check.” Fact-checking is what happens when any Republican says something that the left disagrees with and rarely, if ever, involves actual facts. The classic case was the Washington Post’s fact check maven, Glenn Kessler, rating a Mitt Romney statement “true but false.” There was drama, like a geriatric leftist getting his eyes dotted (I’m not condoning this, by the way, but the Washington Post did a story on it so it seemed newsworthy):

29-year-old Dallas Frazier has been charged with assault for punching a 61-year-old anti-Trump protester outside Trump’s Cincinnati rally yesterday.

Yet another skirmish in the cold civil war of Trump’s America. pic.twitter.com/xly1uXmIOb

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) August 2, 2019

Inside, it was a a fairly standard Trump rally. Some panties were soiled…though Rupar soils his so often it is scarcely worth commenting on:

"Lock her up" chants after Trump brings up Hillary Clinton pic.twitter.com/zlyhmcUWEl

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 1, 2019

There was the usual Trumpian hyperbole, and then this happened:

The homicide rate in Baltimore is significantly higher than El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, I believe it’s higher than, give me a give me a place that you think is pretty bad, give me a place…the guy says Afghanistan…I believe it’s higher than Afghanistan. In our country. Think of that. I believe…we’ll check the numbers and if we’re wrong they will tell us tomorrow, it’ll be headlines.

This incensed ThinkProgresses designated homosexual issues reporter Zack Ford (can I just ask why publications have reporters covering gay sex and not regular, Darwinian type of sex?)

Trump believes the homicide rate in Baltimore is higher than in all of Afghanistan. pic.twitter.com/4Jyos4kfdv

— Zack Ford (@ZackFord) August 1, 2019

If you aren’t familiar with Ford, this is the one thing in his life he’s famous for (I mean he may be really famous in gay sex circles but I don’t frequent those places often enough to find out).

My final words to her were: “Every time you wear the hat, you remember you lost a friendship over it. Every time.” I know for sure I’ll now think of her every time I see a MAGA hat, and I’ll fear its corrupting power even more than I used to. https://t.co/NkcdMHeHMK

— Zack Ford (@ZackFord) July 6, 2019

Welp, let’s do an actual fact check rather than relying on the judgment of someone who doesn’t really have the background, education, or experience to do that. We know that Baltimore’s homicide rate is about 52-56 per 100,000 (it may go higher this weekend…probably will, in fact), see my epic Violence In Elijah Cummings’s District Is So Bad His Constituents Can Qualify For Political Asylum At the Mexican Border for more details. El Salvador’s homicide rate is about 62 per 100,000. That makes El Salvador safer than East St. Louis or Gary or Detroit, but marginally more dangerous than Baltimore. Honduras is about 42 per 100,000 making it safer than Baltimore. Guatemala is at 26…a veritable garden spot by comparison. But Afghanistan?? Afghanistan, in the midst of a war, has a homicide rate of 7 per 100,000. Wonderful.

It should be uncontroversial to say what Baltimore is. It is a failed city. Its population is about 2/3 of what it was in 1950. While areas like Federal Hill and Fells Point might be livable and fun, that is not the majority of the city. A significant portion of the city lives in a situation that is a national disgrace. Last year, six of Baltimore’s high schools were found to have not a single student with grade-level proficiency in reading or math. And keep in mind when evaluating the homicide rate, nearly all of those homicides are clustered in West Baltimore, so the actual rate in that area is orders of magnitude higher than the citywide rate.

There is only controversy because the the member of Congress for that district is Elijah Cummings. Cummings has made a career of surfing off racial grievances while, I maintain, doing absolutely nothing to change the situation because he and his wife owe their careers and livelihoods to keeping people poor, and uneducated, and angry.

Maybe this spat between Trump and Cummings will have the side effect of making people in his district wake up to the fact that they’ve been used to further one man’s career and they will do something about it.

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