monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

All those people in the room and they can't all seem to agree on what he said. Considering the widespread outrage generated by the reports that Trump very specifically used the word "shithole" it's a little weird that it didn't create such a lasting impression in their minds that there would be no confusion or conflicting memories.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said on Monday that his memory “hasn’t evolved” in regards to the explosive immigration meeting during which President Donald Trump reportedly called Haiti, El Salvador, and unnamed African countries “shithole countries.”

While again refusing to explicitly confirm whether or not Trump made those comments, Graham told the Post and Courier “My memory hasn’t evolved. I know what was said and I know what I said.”

Trump spends Martin Luther King Jr. Day at golf course

Trump, by comparison, is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.

Sometimes it is necessary to begin with the obvious. The claim that America needs more Norwegian immigrants and fewer Africans from “shithole countries” is racist. It is not the same as arguing for a higher-skilled immigrant pool. That argument might go something like: “We need a higher-skilled immigrant pool.”

...On this issue, Trump has not earned a single benefit of the doubt. His racial demagoguery in the Central Park Five case . . . his attribution of Kenyan citizenship to Barack Obama . . . his references to Mexican migrants as rapists and murderers . . . his unconstitutional attempt at a Muslim ban . . . his moral equivocation following the deadly protests in Charlottesville . . . his statement, reported by the New York Times, that Nigerians would never “go back to their huts” after seeing America . . . all of these constitute an elaborate pattern of bigotry. Trump makes off-hand racist comments, he promotes racist stereotypes and he incites racism as a political strategy.

In 1998, the professional moral scold William Bennett published a book titled “The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals.” In it, Bennett described blasé attitudes toward presidential adultery as corrosive. Clinton’s promiscuity, he argued, implicated his fitness for governing: “Chronic indiscipline, compulsion, exploitation, the easy betrayal of vows, all suggest something wrong at a deep level — something habitual and beyond control,” he wrote.

I was reminded of Bennett’s words by David Friend’s fascinating recent book, “The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of the American Libido,” about the sexual scandals and cultural upheavals of that decade. In retrospect, the dynamics of the Clinton-era culture wars seem blissfully simple, pitting a sexually libertarian left against an aggressively prudish right. It is a cosmic irony that, 20 years later, it is conservatives who’ve finally killed off the last remaining unspoken rules about presidential sexual ethics.

On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that, a month before the 2016 election, Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen arranged a $130,000 payout to the porn star Stephanie Clifford, known by the stage name Stormy Daniels, to stop her from discussing a 2006 dalliance with Trump. The New York Times added new details. The Daily Beast then reported that another porn actress, Jessica Drake, who had accused Trump of offering her $10,000 for sex, signed a nondisclosure agreement barring her from talking about the president.

In any other administration, evidence that the president paid hush money to the star of “Good Will Humping” during the election would be a scandal. In this one it has, so far, elicited a collective shrug.

(...)

elicited a collective shrug.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Deporting immigrants who came to the United States illegally as children will not be a top federal law enforcement priority even if lawmakers do not pass a program to protect them, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security chief said in an interview aired on Tuesday.

Their study has attracted widespread criticism.

Just when you thought the lawmakers involved in that “shithole countries” meeting at the White House on Thursday hadn't covered themselves in enough shame, here comes a new development.

The Washington Post reported Monday night that the source of the dispute is less about the thrust of President Trump's “shithole” comment and more about the second syllable of that vulgar word. It turns out that the statement Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) issued that sounded as though it was crafted by a dozen lawyers was written that way for a reason: Cotton and Perdue, according to three White House sources, believe Trump said “shithouse” rather than “shithole.” (The New York Times has a source saying the same thing.)

This is apparently all the difference that they needed to issue their statement, which assured that “we do not recall the president saying these comments specifically.” That last word lingers hugely; it means they get to deny one specific word and feel good about having been technically honest. Never mind that the second syllable of that word doesn't change the meaning of Trump's comments one iota.
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