Snopes makes much of the “different contexts” between Obama’s 2016 “shit show” comment and Trump’s alleged and recent “shit hole” query. Snopes somehow doesn’t make much of the fact that while there is no doubt that Obama used the language, Trump’s epithet was not merely given in private, it was divulged by his enemy, Sen. Durbin, who may have misreported it — or even lied about it. Typically, further testimony has tended to fall out along partisan lines.
Also, Snopes’ “mostly false” judgment relies on the setup question, concentrating on “did the media ignore” rather than “did the media repeat the word as a horrible affront to all that is good and decent hundreds of times in one day and relentlessly ever since”?
Leftists have stumbled onto a new mantra, it appears:
shit hole shit hole
shit shit hole hole
hole shit hole shit
Now, I strongly suspect that Trump did in fact say “shit hole” re Haiti. He maybe shouldn’t have. But Durbin should not have repeated it as hearsay, and the press should not have repeated it ad nauseam as an excuse to malign the president, as malignable as he may be.
And, for the record, the Libya mission did turn out to be a shit show, and Haiti is indeed a shit hole country.
But forget for a moment the putative unacceptability of the language of these two presidential pearls. The Libya operation itself reflects badly on Obama . . . and Hillary Clinton. The exact phrasing strikes me as not nearly as interesting.
And is the near facticity of Haiti’s shit hole status really racist?
It seems like a frank (if vulgar) recognition of the dire poverty of the nation. It doesn’t mean Haitians are bad people, but it does indicate that they have not got the knack, as a group, for civilization yet.
But the fact that the Clinton Foundation exploited Haitian tragedy to do good mainly for itself, that does reflect badly on . . . Hillary Clinton!
Who somehow managed to appear as a key player in both the shit show and the shit hole scandals. And not for saying something naughty and un-nice, but for being incompetent and perhaps even murderous and corrupt.
Great going, Hillary; great going, Democrats.
But let us get down to the bedrock issue: is Trump a “racist”? Well, he does say racist things now and then. This may be — but probably is not — one of them.
How? Well, Trump’s comment was not directed at just Haiti, but also at “El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and African countries in the temporary protected status program,” according to a competent report summary. And that is not just black people, but Latin American browns, too. Note that many, many countries with brown-and-darker skinned inhabitants were not also maligned. No mention of Botswana, Brazil, what-have-you.
The most reasonable interpretation of Trump’s query is that it pertained to the current and quite idiotic country-of-origin criterion for granting legal immigration status, and that Trump simply does not understand why America would not use an individual criteria set for granting visas and green cards and the like. And the idea that folks from countries in the very worst conditions might provide emigres with more cultural baggage for assimilation is not a crazy notion. Nor necessarily racist.
Though I know, I know: lots of immigrants from around the world, regardless of country of origin, do well here — often better than those natives who have fallen into the welfare state rut.
Of course, objecting to the phrasing of Trump’s query is not entirely unreasonable. It is “beneath the dignity of the office,” sure, but tell that to all the previous White House vulgarians, greatest of which was probably LBJ. Much of this is really about media focus. Once upon a time, journalists and news outlets ignored this kind of thing. Now they revel in it.
Especially when it is the Republicans who prove the loose tongued.
Many complaints against the query are silly, of course, or worse — school-marmy. Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen insisted that “Language like that shouldn’t be heard in locker rooms and it shouldn’t be heard in the White House.”
What a pompous, impertinent Ms. Grundy. What goes on in locker rooms is none of her shit hole business. The entitlement with which some women in power think they can legislate for men’s speech and lives is astounding,
Utah Rep. Mia Love’s lament is a bit more understandable, for her judgment was that Trump’s wording and sentiment were “unkind, divisive, elitist, and fly in the face of our nation’s values.” Though that last bit is a bit much. I have read American history. I know American values. They are not lockstep prudish or high-minded, no matter how hard some folks have tried to make them so.
Besides, might not America have earned a right to some elitism? People want to come here, from all over the world. Reverse migration to Haiti, Nicaragua and other “temporary protected status” countries is not all that common.
Why?
Well, you know the answer.
Of course, it is the sign of magnanimity not to lord one’s superiority over others. Trump is not magnanimous. Surprise surprise.
But his enemies are relentless in their sanctimony. Is it possible to be more loathsomely and hubristically moralistic than the Chicago Tribune’s Rex Huppke? Maybe had Trump’s statement been less ambiguous, Huppke’s litany of moral challenges to the reader would be easier to take. But as it stands. . . .
Here is the nut of Huppke’s “your response will be remembered” phillipic:
Did you call out the obvious racism behind those statements? Did you acknowledge that the leader of the free world — by title, anyway — had shown himself to be a white supremacist, casually expressing his dislike of brown-skinned immigrants and preference for white European immigrants?
The racism is only “obvious” if all you have is race on the brain. And white supremacist? Come on.
Trump is an American supremacist. That is what is obvious. How racist is he? Probably not much more racist than he is homophobic — which is what leftists were charging him with last year … on no evidence whatsoever.
The tendency to turn one’s enemy into an utter evil monster might best be avoided. And the attempt, running throughout the left’s (and, especially, Democratic partisans’) excoriations, to turn anyone defending the president into a Deplorable? Well, it may make you feel good, but it will probably lead to your cause’s demise. Those called Deplorable will not like it, and may end up rejecting your very standards themselves.
I did not vote for Trump, nor will I if he runs again. But I do hope the Left continues this insane hysteria against Trump and all his supporters. Why?
I want them to lose. They are insufferable fools and Pharisaic posturers.
And Snopes’ pretension to objectivity? Not believable.
twv
Wirkman Comment 