For what it's worth

We now have a senator on record as saying that Donald Trump didn't use the term "shithole" in his discussion:

Georgia Republican Sen. David Perdue said Sunday that President Donald Trump did not use the phrase "shithole countries" during a meeting with lawmakers on immigration reform last week.

"I'm telling you he did not use that word, George, and I'm telling you it's a gross misrepresentation," Perdue told moderator George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week."

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL, says he did, but not directly:

According to Durbin, Trump had told a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the White House that he'd rather have more immigrants from Norway and fewer from "shithole countries" in Africa and said the U.S. didn't need anymore people from Haiti.  to describe Haiti and African nations where some immigrants to the United States come from."I have seen the comments in the press, I have not read one of them that's inaccurate," Durbin, a Democrat, told reporters in Chicago.

"In the course of (Trump's) comments, he said things that were hate-filled, vile and racist," the Illinois senator said Friday. "l use those words advisingly, I understand how powerful they are. I cannot believe that in the history of the White House and that Oval Office any president has ever spoken the words that I personally heard our president speak yesterday.

Durbin apparently gets to decide the intent of someone's remarks, and his decision is probative. Good to know. Durbin says a lot of things. In 2013, he said something else:

The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Sen. Dick Durbin, said in a Facebook post that a House Republican leader told off President Barack Obama during a negotiation meeting, and that GOP leaders are so disrespectful it’s practically impossible to have a conversation with them.

But Wednesday afternoon, both the White House and House speaker’s office denied his claims.

“In a ‘negotiation’ meeting with the president, one GOP House Leader told the president: ‘I cannot even stand to look at you,’” Durbin wrote in a post on his Facebook page over the weekend.

Durbin also said this, in 2005:

Durbin read from an FBI report that included descriptions of one case at Gitmo in which a detainee was held in such cold temperatures that he shivered, another in which a prisoner was held in heat passing 100 degrees, one in which prisoners were left in isolation so long they fouled themselves and one where a prisoner was chained to the floor and forced to listen to loud rap music.

"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings," Durbin said last week.

After the uproar that followed those remarks, Durbin said he was not comparing U.S. soldiers to Pol Pot (search), Nazis or Soviet guards, but was "attributing this form of interrogation to repressive regimes such as those that I note."

You can certainly believe Dick Durbin if you'd like. I wouldn't.