If you follow the news, you will have heard of the recent dispute between the United States and Israel over Israel’s plans to build more trailer parks on what everyone else in the world considers Palestinian land. I’m not going to get into detail on the issue, except to note that as part of the general finger-wagging over the whole affair, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was brought to the White House and, presumably, called on the carpet for causing so much trouble.
Only somehow it’s hard to imagine Barack Obama standing behind his desk, chewing out Netanyahu or anyone at all for that matter, let alone making him sweat so bad that as soon as he leaves the office he immediately reverses his country’s long-standing foreign policy fundamentals, as was presumably intended when the meeting was called. This isn’t unique to the current President, either. American voters tend to elect a guy that they’d be comfortable having a beer with, which means that there hasn’t been an American President capable of the sort of paint-stripping tirade that was obviously called for in this case since probably Lyndon Johnson.
Johnson, some will recall, once prevented Greece from sending troops into Cyprus by calling the Greek ambassador into the Oval Office, then picking him up by the ears and screaming at him from a distance of six inches for over an hour, spitting tobacco juice down his shirt the whole time. Johnson then “pecker slapped” the ambassador — his words, not mine — and threw him through a plate glass window into some rose bushes. This was called “the Johnson treatment” and is the reason why the Oval Office windows are now made of bulletproof glass and the Greek ambassador’s shirts are made of stain-resistant microfiber.
LBJ winding up to pimp-slap a 90 year-old man.
Undoubted though President Obama’s other merits may be, this is a performance that only a handful of politicians can emulate. Theodore Roosevelt ended the Russo-Japanese War by inviting the Russian and Japanese ambassadors onto a yacht, then dangling them overboard by their ankles and holding their heads under water until they agreed to sign the peace treaty — an act for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Andrew Jackson would just coldly threaten to duel anyone who “insulted his honor” by disagreeing with him. By the time he was President, of course, he’d already killed 113 men in affairs of honor, so he didn’t so much have to directly threaten people as just casually glance at the well-worn set of matched pistols hanging on the wall before John C. Calhoun or whoever it was got the message and decided that it might not be the right time to secede from the Union. Unfortunately for us there’s just no one in American government these days who can pull off this sort of intense personal intimidation for the good of the Republic.
Good thing our allies across the pond have got us covered. I am referring of course to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Brown, a 6′4″ 250 lb Glaswegian rugby player, blind in one eye from being kicked in the head one too many times, is a notorious hardass. Recently his own cabinet secretary called the law on him for being violently aggressive with his staff, calling the British “national bullying hotline” — something that could only exist in the UK — and reporting that he routinely flew into a rage, threw furniture, threatened to hit people and swore so virulently that their delicate English sensibilities were bruised beyond repair. In one notable incident Brown was riding in the back seat of his official Rolls Royce when somebody passed him a note saying that Celtic F. C. had just been beat by Aberdeen. He reacted by punching the cop sitting in the shotgun seat in the back of the head, causing him to place a call to the National Hurt Feelings Hotline and then go home and cry himself to sleep.
If you want to see Gord in action, look no further than my favorite television program of all, Prime Minister’s Question Time on C-SPAN, where you can see him square off in the House of Commons against the leader of the opposition, prancing pretty boy David Cameron. Cameron will from time to time use all of his allotted six questions to basically taunt Brown, in the finest traditions of the House. He will get up there and let loose with something like, “Mr. Speaker, as I was saying to the Right Honourable Gentleman’s mother the other night, in his best selling book about courage, he talks about courage being necessary to govern effectively. Does he realize that children as young as three are so busy laughing as his hypocrisy that they are unable to eat, and when will he start to care about the starving children of Britain?”
Although the established decorum of the 900 year-old British Parliament prevents even such a man as Gordon Brown from actually leaping across the table and throttling Cameron with his tie, it’s clear from watching him that it takes every ounce of restraint in him to hold back. Shaking with rage, he will stare Cameron down and point out that he was a Member of Parliament when Cameron was a glint in the milkman’s eye, so why doesn’t he just shut the fuck up.
But if standing up to the smart-aleck aristo leader of Britain’s Conservative Party doesn’t impress you (and no one is blaming you if it doesn’t) then what about Russian Gangster Czar Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, whose status as a former KGB agent puts him squarely into Bond villain territory, and who is not known for taking crap off of anyone.
Gordon Brown has been using the grip exerciser.
Gordon Brown met Putin recently at a G8 summit, and showed him who was boss before he was even out of the cloak room. A picture is worth a thousand words, and in this case 333 of those words are “Rule,” 333 are “Britannia” and 334 are “Motherfucker.” Brown is clearly squashing Putin’s hand like it’s a bag of wet spaghetti — the manliest gesture of all — and leaning aggressively into what would be easy tobacco- spitting range if he were Johnson. Putin, for his part, is leaning backward uncomfortably while Brown, sporting a five-o’clock shadow, looms over him like a hungry bear. Compare to this picture of LBJ to see the similarity of technique.
Brown learned from the master.
The implications for Anglo-American foreign policy are clear. President Obama should delegate the chewing out of obnoxious chickenshit little countries’ heads of government to our British allies, saving time to focus on his strengths: inspirational speechifying and passing health care reform bills.