RAHEEM KASSAM (CO-HOST): I have absolutely no problem with him using that language in a private meeting. That's up to him. I don't think we or -- I say we, I don't think you guys, as Americans, ever thought you were electing a saint. I don't think you were electing a Pope. And I certainly don't think you thought he was this sort of polite infallible gentleman. I would add to that as well, if you go back through history, if these journalists who are freaking out about it, if the news anchors, if the late night show hosts, who are freaking out about this use of language in the Oval Office, would actually care to pick up and read a book, they might learn some things about their own heroes that they don't particularly consider presidential. Plenty about what JFK was like, plenty about what many other U.S. presidents were like. And indeed I do believe that language can be -- I think cadence can be improved sometimes with crude language. If you look at Shakespeare, for instance, there were plenty of occasions in which he was seen to drop in things that were not OK back then, and things that would challenge the audience, and disturb the audience, and shock the audience. And so, I don't buy the whole, presidential, unpresidential, especially when it comes to a single use of a single word like this.
But what really bugs me, Alex, is that for years we have been told that migration is a -- and I'm just quoting some key phrases that I pulled this morning from major establishment organizations, think tanks, et cetera, et cetera. Migration is a factor in development and poverty reduction. We've been told about the impacts on migration and rural poverty and inequality. We have seen, as they have run migration as basically a mass anti-poverty program. We're talking about OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] better life rankings, economic rankings, social and healthcare rankings, education rankings, life satisfaction rankings, work-life balance rankings. And there are rankings. There are rankings from one to however many countries there are in the world now, and to say that a crude way of sort of getting that across isn't what the president said I think is disingenuous. They have banged it into our heads now, Alex, for decades that there are places in the world that are pretty much uninhabitable because of any of these different factors. Maybe corruption, maybe, they'll say climate change, it may be poverty, it may be low crop yield. All of these things, and if you look at certain places in the world and you add all those things together, and if you're in a country that's at the bottom end of those lists, well then I think the president was basically using shorthand for what the establishment has drummed into our heads.
