OF S**THOLES AND SECOND THOUGHTS: A former Peace Corps volunteer says based on her experience, Trump was right.

Rod Dreher

"Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a few decades later, liberals would be pushing the lie that Western civilization is no better than a third-world country.  Or would teach two generations of our kids that loving your own culture and wanting to preserve it are racism."

A Senegalese man at the market. Might he one day be a good American [Democrat]?  

. . . "On the other hand, I get Andrew Klavan’s point in this City Journal column defending Trump”. Klavan says that political correctness keeps people from saying things that are true, out of fear that they will be called racist, or some other form of bigot. He points out that the police in the English city of Rotherham allowed Pakistani Muslim gangs to rape and otherwise sexually exploit at least 1,400 non-Muslim English girls for years — and hesitated to do anything about it, out of fear of being thought racist. Klavan sees the same malign principle at work in the pile-on of Trump. Excerpt:

Let’s state the obvious. Some countries are shitholes. To claim that this is racist is racist. They are not shitholes because of the color of the populace but because of bad ideas, corrupt governance, false religion, and broken culture. Further, most of the problems in these countries are generated at the top. Plenty of rank-and-file immigrants from such ruined venues ultimately make good Americans—witness those who came from 1840s potato-famine Ireland, a shithole if ever there was one! It takes caution and skill to separate the good from the bad.

For these very reasons, absurd immigration procedures like chain migration, lotteries, and unvetted entries are deeply destructive. They can lead to the sort of poor choices that create a Rotherham. Trump’s suggestions—to vet immigrants for pro-American ideas and skills that will help our country—are smart and reasonable and would clearly make the system better if implemented.

. . . 

So what if the President Trump did use that word?   "The president's actions and results are what counts, not any Durbin-alone-detected finger-in-the-air undaintiness of vocabulary.  The president is not saintly.  We do not need dainty.  With madmen in North Korea and ayatollah Iran and countries to the left and right of the equatorial meridians, we do not worship – or ought not worship – the eloquence-meter of the man."

 Ann Althouse posts: After “Fire and Fury” and the “s***hole” smear, Trump isn’t any less popular than before.  "But, who knows?, maybe the possibility that he had sex with a porn star 12 years ago or the Senators shutting down the government over DACA will turn people against him."