I hope you had a joyful Christmas in the company of your friends and loved ones, engaging in favorite activites. While you were doing that, the man who likes to call himself your favorite president was engaged in one of his favorite activities - killing a bunch of people. Not with his own hands, of course: he gets others to do his dirty work for him. As so often, he relied this time on the ability of the United States armed forces to drop bombs on people any time, anywhere. As a diversion from killing people on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific - has that gotten stale already, after only about 100? - he went after people in Nigeria. Funny how his victims tend to be people of a certain hue of complexion. I think it's an odd way to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, but hey, to each his own, right?
Your favorite president, if I may be forgiven for calling him that, tipped his hat to his putative Savior by saying that the justification for blowing up brown people thousands of miles away in one of what he has described as the "shit countries" was that the targets belonged to "terrorist" groups who are engaged in a campaign of "slaughter" and "genocide" against Christians, to whom they pose an "existential threat." As ever, the falsity of the president's statements can be inferred easily from their utterance by his mouth, and the degree of their falsity can be inferred just as easily from the magnitude of the hyperbole in which he couches them.
To be sure, as reported on NPR this morning by people with actual knowledge of the places involved, which your favorite president probably could not find on a map, northern Nigeria does possess a certain number of armed Islamist extremists. They are a small minority among the scores of armed groups of bandits, many of which number in the hundreds, thousands in the aggregate, who prey indiscriminately on the civil society around them without regard to religious affiliation. Unlike the Islamists, they are not ideological. They are thieves and rapists and murderers. (In these respects, they have something in common with your favorite president.) Because most of the population in that area is Muslim, so are most of the victims. The bulk of Nigeria's Christian population lives in the southern part of the country, relatively untouched by the violence. In short, the existential threat, insofar as it exists, is to law and order and civil society in northern Nigeria, not to followers of Christ's teachings such as that murder is wrong. (See Mount, Sermon On The.)
But your favorite president usually doesn't lie without a purpose. Many of his followers who identify as Christian are understandably dismayed by the possibility increasingly approaching certainty that their favorite president shared his good buddy Jeffrey Epstein's proclivity for "women on the younger side," to quote YFP on the subject of their mutual interest, in a manner rather more than platonic. Your favorite president likes to wave the Bible to remind his followers that he is their latter-day savior. If he can do so in connection with indulging his taste for offing some "garbage" from "shithole countries", to adopt his own language with reference to the people he chooses to smite, that's gravy.
Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year.
