President orders the Pentagon to plan an invasion of Nigeria via social network.

The President watched a Fox News report on a Friday night. The report was about violence in Nigeria. By Saturday morning, the President had designated Nigeria a “country of particular concern,” ordered the Pentagon to begin planning military action, and posted on his social network that the United States might go in “guns-a-blazing.”

Buddy. Guns-a-blazing. That is a thing you say at the end of a Western, not at the start of a war.

I have been arguing with televisions for thirty years. I have never, not once, watched a segment on the news and then ordered the United States military to invade a continent of two hundred and thirty million people because the chyron got me agitated. The Pentagon is not a Yelp review you fire off when the steak is cold.

The thing the President is mad about is real. There is religious violence in northern Nigeria. There are also fifty separate attacks on Christians documented by ACLED this year, in a country with a population larger than every Western European country combined, in a year with one thousand nine hundred and twenty-three attacks on civilians total. The number for “Christian genocide” is not the same number as the number for “lots of bad stuff happens in Nigeria.” A real one is the second one. The first one is what the chyron said.

NBC News reported the same evening that the post had triggered a “White House scramble.” That is the polite name for the meeting where adults in suits explain to other adults in suits what just happened on the President’s phone.

The Nigerian foreign ministry, which is a real ministry of a real country, said no. They said: there is no Christian genocide. They also said, very politely, that they would welcome cooperation as long as nobody invaded them.

That is a sentence you should not have to write to your largest African trading partner on a Saturday.

I’m arguing with the television again.