Did Genghis Khan Get Congressional Approval? - Trump, Drug Boats, And 'You Talkin' To Me?'

President Trump has been blowing Venezuelan drug boats out of the water on their way to US ports, 'saving thousands of American lives', and that much is certainly true.

'You can't do that!', shout progressives who want the President to seek Congressional approval before sending his missiles down on defenseless boats, wantonly killing their crews. 'An act of arrogant, autocratic rule...another example of wanton, illegal executive power...nothing less than a brutal, untoward act of aggression...'

'Think Genghis Khan', said the President. 

Genghis Khan was a charismatic and fearsome figure.  He and his armies were known for their cruelty and barbarity, and the sight of them advancing across the battlefield in a storm of dust, the earth shaking with the thunder of 50,000 hooves, was enough to send enemies into retreat. 

The thought alone of this terrible, bloodthirsty, and mighty warrior was enough to rout enemy armies. Genghis Khan was a man of absolute will and power, a frightening presence of power and vengeance.  He was a horseman of the Apocalypse. 

Khan had no qualms, moral reservations, or ethical hesitancy.  Wars were for winning, civilians were complicit enemies, and total annihilation of any opposition was his modus belli. Not only would defeated populations be without the wherewithal to mount a resistance or counterattack, they would never dare to incite the bloody, murderous, savage wrath of the conqueror.

Today’s political progressives choose to ignore Genghis Khan as an anomaly, a one-time phenomenon, a primitive throwback to the Stone Age.  There are no lessons to be taken from him, they say, except for his irrelevance to our newly aware, profoundly moral, utopian age.  Social progress will be assured through dialogue, diplomacy, and good will.  

Nonsense, of course.  Wars, violence, civil strife, aggression, and mayhem are expressions of the hardwired genetic code that makes us tick - that territorial, self-interested nature that makes us human.  Wars have been part and parcel of history since the Paleolithic.  Human DNA has not changed, so our penchant for violence has not either. 

Ever since the first human settlements, violence, brutality, conquest, and bloody empire have been the rule; and the acquisition, maintenance, and extension of power at all levels of human society is still our modus operandi.

Yes, conservatives admit, this aggressive, territorial, self-interested human nature will be the cause of future armed conflict between interest groups, regions, and nations; but that is as it has always been.  Arming rather than disarming is the only reasonable, historical move in a hostile world.  Wars will inevitably happen, and victory should always be the goal.

Conservatives are content with the legacy of Genghis Khan and have no issue with the Crusades, the Persian Empire, the Seleucids, or Gao.  Europe, China, Japan, and India were at constant war for centuries, and while there were winners and losers, there was no moral consequence.  History was simply reconfigured. 

All of which is to explain conservatives’ bemusement at progressive utopianism, an ill-conceived, ahistorical, idealistic political philosophy.  There is no doubt, these conservatives conclude, that the current reformist hysteria will die down, progressivism will go the way of socialism and communism, and America will return unabashedly and unashamedly to its Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian principles.

'War is diplomacy by other means', said Clausewitz.  Violence is but one of many tools in the foreign policy chest.  Machiavelli many centuries earlier suggested much the same thing.  War should be undertaken only when a distinct national self-interest is at stake; and if and when it is, then overwhelming force to defeat the enemy is justified and called for. 

Bob Muzelle, approaching his later years but no less of a committed progressive, took to the hustings to harangue the President for his 'brutal, untoward attacks, an expression of arrogant machismo, defiance of international rule of law, and a plunge into the depths of uncontrollable violent xenophobic passion'. 

Febrile screeds were Bob's modus operandi, his calling card, his ethos; and people came less to listen to his political exegesis than to watch this whirling dervish, this man possessed, overcome by righteous anger and vehement opposition.  He was a wonder, a flailing wild man, spittle flying, fists pumping the air, his face turning red and apoplectic with frustration and boiling hostility.  

'Never in the history of American governance have we seen such a bully, such a primitive, bludgeoning, unrepentant ape in the White House.  Our suspicions about the anti-democratic intentions of the man have been proven again and again, and this unconscionable attack on the Venezuelan people is but the latest example'. 

Bob paused for breath, wiped his brow, picked up a dog-eared copy of the Constitution, and not unlike an old time Baptist preacher shaking the Bible before a packed congregation, said, 'This, my good people, is what Donald J Trump thinks of the Constitution', throwing it into a dumpster hauled on stage. 'Yes, a dumpster.  Detritus, trash, leavings, no different than old chicken bones. This is what your president thinks of America'. 

 

The audience hooted and hollered and yelled for more, but Bob was spent, energy depleted, resources emptied.  He quieted the crowd, smiling, and shouted La Lucha Continua and walked off stage to waves of applause. 

Of course the President was unmoved and unrepentant. The painting of Genghis Khan on the wall of the Oval Office was not there by happenstance.  It was a daily reminder of his promise to the American people - to restore order, strength, confidence, and ability and to extend the reach of the American republic far and wide. 

 

Venezuelan drug boats? 'Fleas', said the President, 'to be squooshed'. 

Again Bob howled.  How could the President of the United States be so unfeeling, heartless, and indifferent.  Yes, granted, there might....might..be drugs on the boats, but nothing to justify the wanton taking of lives; but of course even if the President had heard Bob's craven squeaks, he would have paid them no mind. His was a mighty mission of historical imperative. He was no gay Jimmy Carter, opining about peace and love, or the vacuous Joe Biden.  No, his mission was pre-ordained.  

When the liberal press got wind of Trump's channeling of the Mongol emperor, they had a field day.  Pictures of bloody heads on stakes, bodies littering fallow fields, horsemen charging down in numbers beheading everyone in their path were shown behind the sad, mournful face of the Reverend Al Sharpton who invoked Lord God Almighty to stop America's Demon of Fleet Street. 

Trump loved the 'fake news' even as he criticized it. Let eunuchs bitch and cavil, he knew what heroes were made of, and he was one.  He indeed was a king, an emperor, a mighty exterminating angel.  Why deny it?