What Would TR Have Done?

So the British schoolteacher in Sudan — the teddy bear idolater — has been released and pardoned on charges of insulting Islam. Not having followed the case at all, I’m nevertheless delighted when the scales tip in favor of those undeservedly accused and convicted of violating bullshit laws.

All that aside, I think we can all be grateful that Thomas Smith, the National Review‘s house fabulist, wasn’t assigned to negotiate on behalf of Gillian Gibbons. Last week, Smith shook his fists in the air, hyperventilated about Sudan’s “insulting [of] the West,” and wished Teddy Roosevelt were alive to set things straight:

I can’t help but believe that if she had been an American — and Theodore Roosevelt (speaking of “Teddy Bears”) were alive today and in the White House — we would have dispatched a couple of warships to the Red Sea, threatened to land Marines, and flown jets low over Khartoum until she was released. And we wouldn’t have waited very long either.

Smith’s absurd declaration evidently drew huzzahs of approval from readers, including a Penn State professor of education who wrote that

I agree 100% with your take on what Teddy Roosevelt would have done with Sudan. The current British PM’s lightness of weight on this matter is unbearable. Had I been him, I would have notified the Sudanese that any harm brought to this woman would result in the loss of at least one mosque, preferably one filled with radical Islamist males.

Now, it’s not surprising that certain varieties of conservative would have man-crushes on Teddy Roosevelt. After all, he was a belligerent executive authoritarian whose dime-novel masculinity consisted mostly of shooting animals and complaining that he was surrounded by lady boys who lacked the will to get things done; he spent most of his presidency threatening other nations with war, yet he never had the prunes to initiate actual hostilities against anyone who might actually muster a defense; he detested Congress, and no more so when its members made any noises whatsoever about overseeing his foreign policy; he was a belated convert to the cause of women’s rights, a shift that came at the tail end of a life devoted to the proposition that women were little more than pods for the species; and he believed the evolution of white civilization required constant struggle against the barbarian hordes who lived beyond the borders and who — via loose immigration laws — threatened to spoil the nation from within.

So yes, in Smith’s hypothetical, Teddy Roosevelt probably would have howled madly about the savage African captivity of an Anglo-Saxon woman; he would have sprung wood at the thought of mustering and leading a rescue mission on her behalf; he would have scolded Gibbons herself for only breeding twice during her childbearing years; and he would have accused his peers of having eclairs for spines.

In other words, he would have fit in quite well at some of our finer outposts of electronic wingnuttery, and he would have sounded like a goddamned moron to boot.