Forget replacing ObamaCare, tax reform, repairing America’s infrastructure, or fixing our entitlements—those things are too hard, and too time-consuming. Bombing a country in the Mideast, it turns out, is a much easier way to win bipartisan applause.
President Trump earned a thumbs up from Democrats and liberal pundits after he decided to launch dozens of cruise missiles into a Syrian airbase as retaliation for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical attack on his own people.
“This week’s unspeakable chemical weapons attack is only the latest in a long series of horrors perpetrated by Bashar al-Assad on innocent men, women and children,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement. “Tonight’s strike in Syria appears to be a proportional response to the regime’s use of chemical weapons.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer took a break from standing in the way of the president’s agenda and concurred with her Democratic colleague: “Making sure Assad knows that when he commits such despicable atrocities he will pay a price is the right thing to do,” Schumer said. “I salute the professionalism and skill of our Armed Forces who took action today.”
Just a mere few hours before Trump launched the assault, Hillary Clinton said that the United States should “take out” Assad’s airfields in order to prevent future chemical weapon attacks on civilians.
“Assad has an air force, and that air force is the cause of most of these civilian deaths as we have seen over the years and as we saw again in the last few days,” Clinton said at the “Women in the World Summit.”
Republicans were also pleased with Trump’s decision. Sen. Marco Rubio took to CBS’s This Morning express his happiness, but also sprinkled in a little fear mongering by recklessly asserting that Syria could use chemical weapons against Americans.
Smell that? That’s the smell of bipartisan blood-thirst.
The only problem Congressional Democratic leadership had with Trump’s move was that he didn’t get permission from them first. After all, it’s just not fair that he gets all the credit for escalating our presence in another country’s messy civil war! (Pelosi added that she was concerned that Trump was starting “another open-ended war in the Middle East.” But apparently she didn’t have any such concern when President Obama was launching airstrikes and ordering boots on the ground just a year ago.)
Liberal pundits and members of the mainstream media also viewed Trump’s intervention as a transformative event for his presidency. In a particularly deranged moment, NBC’s Brian Williams called the Pentagon’s videos of the missile launches “beautiful.”
Over at CNN, Fareed Zakaria viewed the bombings as some sort of metaphysical event and said, “I think Donald Trump became President of the United States.”
Who knew all it took to become presidential was to lob a few bombs in the desert? Of course, it makes sense: After all, Trump is just following a 30- (or so) year tradition by American presidents of fighting wars in the Mideast.
Who needs peace when you can have war? The easiest way to reach across the aisle isn’t with legislative compromise, it’s with a Tomahawk missile.