The War President
You have to love a man who’s willing, in less than a day, to change his mind on important foreign affairs. Give him a TV show to watch and if it shows children being Sarin gassed, well, the man’s heart bleeds and the policy he announced just the past week to let the Syrians decide for themselves regarding Assad’s presidency gets reversed. He was opposed to bombing them back in the first chemical attacks on Assad’s own people, but now, well, that was one powerful TV program apparently.
Most of the Congress seems to love a good war. Especially one that’s short and sweet and doesn’t involve our own troops. Send 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles to destroy an airbase, hey, they can rally around that flag. Course, we had to warn the Russians to evacuate and they warned their Syrian allies, but if you want great visuals for TV coverage, nothing beats 59 Tomahawk missiles homing in on one target. Unless it’s 60. We do love air power.
Me, I like to be a bit more judicious when I attack a country whose ally is Russia. Maybe consider the geopolitical consequences. But most Americans like decisiveness. They like revenge. And so what if Iraq turned into a quagmire and the rest of the Middle East is ablaze? We showed those Arabs strength and if there’s one thing we believe, it’s that nations respect strength. You go the route of peaceful negotiation, well, they’ll mock you behind your back. They’ll play you for a chump. Just like we learned watching 1950’s sitcoms, bullies respect the kid who stands up to them. Because deep down they’re cowards….
I used to believe that too. Until I stood up to a couple of them when I was a kid. I got some great lessons. I learned they’re not actually cowards, they’re mean and they’re bullies because they’re assholes. I also learned I really didn’t know how to fight. I got the stuffing beat out of me every time. And I learned that principals and teachers, those folks who say they’ll back you up if you stand up to a bully, they won’t. They’ll drag you down to the office and they’ll call your parents and they’ll lecture you on the senselessness of violence.
My parents, raised in hard scrabble small towns in the backwashes of Maine, told me you only fight when someone hits you first, but then you knock the bejabbers out of them. If you can. Trouble is, you have to wait for that first punch. And that first punch, more often than not, finished me off. Somewhere around the start of high school I decided that I wasn’t the cop who righted wrongs. If I wasn’t attacked, then a better plan was to avoid the punks and the thugs. Not every wrong was a call to battle.
Trump ran on something similar. It was one thing I liked about him, maybe the only thing. It’s hard to tell what this guy believes, but one thing is for sure, whatever it is, it can change overnight. Keeps the enemy off balance. Actually, keeps all of us off balance.
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Tags: sarin gas, Syrian retaliation, tomahawk missiles, warrior president
One thing I learned from bullies in school, they weren’t generally the A students. Or B students. Or even the C students.
That trait seems to hold for international political leaders. Saddam Hussein didn’t think anyone would ever come after him or beat him. Or use the bluff that he possessed WMD’s as an excuse to chase him all the way into a dead end spider hole. Then there’s the guy in North Korea. Not the sharpest intellect on the peninsula, especially compared to the folks at Samsung and Hyundai. There’s also a long line of African dictators in the same category.
Clearly, you don’t have to be the smartest guy in the room to lead a country. Even in America, we have to watch that playing out as the worst daily reality show ever, in HD.
I realize we don’t have to have the smartest guy in the White House, but c’mon, does he have to be this dumb? He could just add the following to his robo-answers via Spicer and Conway: who knew any of this was so complicated?