I see where President Mountain Dew Coma.... oh sorry, I meant President Trump, has referred to the homelands of some of the huddled masses yearning to be free as "shithole" countries.
What's the problem? They are shithole countries.
A more productive discussion might focus on the reasons why those countries are shitholes.
Take Libya for example. Who can doubt that Libya today is a shithole by any metric? But a mere seven or eight years ago Libya was by far the most successful nation state in all of Africa. Who made it the shithole it is today?
Hint; it wasn't the Libyans.
Iraq's pretty much a shithole too, isn't it? Did the Iraqis make their country a shithole, or did they have help from outside?
And Haiti? We've been so busy gifting Haiti freedom and democracy that we've had to remove a democratically elected government not once, but twice over the past quarter century.
We could go down the list of shithole countries one by one and analyse why they are shitholes, and believe me, we'd spend a lot of time discussing American foreign policy.
The irony is that the Exceptional Nation is itself becoming quite a shithole. I've known America first-hand from the sixties right up until they said I had to get a passport to catch a Sabres game. Across those fifty years I met many fine Americans, but it was also plainly obvious that the Exceptional Nation was sliding inexorably towards shitholedom.
Are we there yet?
It's not as though Trump's comment was meant to help people focus on the reasons these nations are experiencing problems. He was simply dismissing the entire population of such countries as unworthy of consideration. The sorts of considerations you rightly address here become more difficult to address in public with attitudes like his. ...part of the U.S. sinking into that shithole.
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