12 March—The first robins of pre-spring were doing their thing by the kitchen door this morning. They likely had never left Litchfield for the winter and were pretty chubby, doubtless because it’s been pretty easy for them to find worms and grubs in the soft earth during this fairly mild and low-snow winter. So far. Spring comes next week. And we’re due for a major spring snow. Wait and see. Anyway, the American robin is known taxonomically as Turdus migratorius, Latin for migratory thrush.

So much for Turdus, then. Now to turds. There’s Donald Trump, of course. But there’s also Joe Biden. Today it’s Biden’s turn to be pilloried. Perhaps Trump’s only saving grace is that he doesn’t mince words. Some wouldn’t consider that a saving grace, to be sure, but his thoroughly crude and tactless demeanor—shooting from the lip, as it were—has a certain charm. It certainly works for him. And you don’t often (ever?) see Trump or his satraps walking back anything he says. You’ve got to appreciate that.

Joe Biden and his politically correct panderers, on the other hand, have made it an embarrassing point to walk back a lot of his honest utterances. And Joe’s infrequent honesty has nothing to do with his extreme maturity. So Joe’s latest blurt came in his State of the Union address last week, when, having been lured into a trap by the reprehensible Trump lieutenant Marjorie Taylor Greene, he thoughtlessly referred to an illegal immigrant as an illegal immigrant—or, rather, simply as an illegal.

Not long afterward, Joe apologized for his guileless honesty: “I shouldn’t have used illegal—it’s undocumented.” And indeed it is “undocumented” and has been for the Biden administration since a few months after Joe took office as POTUS 46.

In an executive order in April 2021, antique freshman President Biden instructed immigration enforcement agencies to change how they referred to illegal immigrants. No longer were the illegal aliens to be “illegal aliens.” Perish the thought. By the magic of an executive order they became—at least within the Biden administration—“undocumented noncitizens.” And Joe and his gutless coterie pandering to all the wrong people—illegals and their relatives and friends, all of whom might vote—were (and are) dead serious.

Undocumented noncitizens indeed. Isn’t that merely another way of saying “illegal aliens”?

Back in 2013, the Associated Press Stylebook, obsequiously followed by too many publications that take the AP and themselves too seriously, dictated that “illegal immigrant” and the use of “illegal” to describe a person were out, “illegal” now being acceptable only to describe an action.

But even the politically correct Associated Press didn’t imagine “undocumented noncitizens” . . .