Ever since I went to China in 2006, I pay a little more attention to it than most people.

My daughter was born there, and there will always be part of my heart that loves the country, but there are things I don’t like about China.

From its authoritarian government and its human rights abuses to its staggering poverty in large, rural swaths of the country to the way it has for years stolen both trade and military secrets from the United States.

There are aspects of Chinese government that are complete and total catastrophes, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world.

So, my question is, why doesn’t Elaine Chao, the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump’s transportation secretary, go back and help fix the totally broken place from where she came and then come back and show us how it is done? That place needs her help badly, she can’t leave fast enough.

Whoa!

Did I just write that?

Related:Matt Bevin, Andy Beshear pass on calling Trump's 'go back' tweet racist

Normally those words would never have flown from my fingertips. A few days ago, it would have seemed wrong to write that. Wrong to even think that.

Telling someone of a different ethnicity or race to “go back where you came” always seemed among the most racist of racist things one could say. In the southern United States, when those words were said in the past, they were often preceded or followed by the N-word.

Lord only knows what horrible things Elizabeth Eckford, one of the nine black students who integrated Little Rock Central High School in 1957, heard just before and after 15-year-old Hazel Bryan screamed “Go back to Africa” at her.

But obviously I was mistaken.

The president tells me that telling someone to go back to where they came from — even if one is an African American woman, one is a Somali-born woman, one is a second-generation Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx, and one second-generation Palestian-American woman — is perfectly fine.

“Those Tweets were NOT Racist. I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!” Trump tweeted Monday.

McConnell appears to agree.

During a Tuesday press conference, he blamed both sides for hypercharged rhetoric — a thing Republicans in the Trump era love to do — and suggested everyone needs to cool it.

"The president is not a racist," McConnell said after reporters wouldn’t let him get away with his vague condemnations of everyone but no explicit condemnation of the guy who regularly heads to Twitter to blow his dog whistle.

McConnell, who has never been shy about calling his political foes racists when they criticize his wife, refused to say if he would consider a similar attack on his wife racist.

Read this:Sen. Mitch McConnell says President Donald Trump 'is not a racist'

He then changed the subject and noted she came to the country legally when she was 8 years old, as if racism can only be practiced against people who came here without a visa.

On Wednesday, Gov. Matt Bevin, who once accused Lexington Herald-Leader cartoonist Joel Pett of “racist ideology” after Pett referenced Bevin’s children, four of whom were adopted from Africa, refused to take a stand when asked if he would consider it racist if someone called on his children to go back from where they came.

Democrat Andy Beshear didn't do much better. He condemned what Trump said but refused to say if he thought Trump's tweets were racist. Obviously, he thinks some of you are racists and doesn't want to lose your votes.

So, one of two things is going on here.

Either McConnell was blatantly using his wife’s Asian ethnicity in a purely political effort to hammer his political opponents in the past, or he is a coward who refuses to take on a sitting Republican president who repeatedly says and does racist things — simply because criticizing Trump could harm him politically.

Ditto for Bevin.

And Beshear just lacks guts.

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Fact is, Chao, whose family moved from mainland China to Taipei in 1949, four years before she was born, during the Chinese Civil War, shouldn’t go back to "where she came" from unless she wants to return. And no one — not me, not you and especially not the president of the United States — should tell her otherwise.

Nor should the president tell U.S. Reps. Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib that they should go back where they come from. Especially since three of them were born in the United States.

It’s been interesting to see the president and his supporters twist what he said in recent days to convince themselves that the man who has banned refugees from Muslim nations, who has promised to build a wall keeping dark-complected people from crossing our border, and the man who called developing countries “shit holes,” is not a racist.

You can decide if he’s a racist yourself.

But his words clearly were racist, and I feel dirty for even suggesting — even satirically — that a person of color doesn’t belong here.

I’m going to take a shower.

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Joseph Gerth's opinion column runs on most Sundays and at various times throughout the week. He can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at jgerth@courierjournal.com. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/josephg.