We Just Conquered Venezuela

I think Trump may have just started World War III.

Trump's invasion of Venezuela doesn't make sense on the surface.  He made it clear that it was about oil.  In fact, there's no strategic advantage to an American occupation of Venezuela.  But there's no economic advantage to taking control of their oil either. at least not in the foreseeable future, because there's a global supply of oil clearly bigger than the demand, and the demand may lessen as industrialized countries other than the United States pursue renewable energy.  But when you realize that Venezuela is just the first step in imposing an American sphere of influence on the entire Western Hemisphere, even as American oil companies can go in and take over the petroleum infrastructure, then it begins to make perfect sense.  Manifest destiny.

It also puts us on Trump's agenda.  American domination of the Western Hemisphere is what he wants to talk about - not about Jeffrey Epstein, not about health care, not about a runaway Supreme Court . . . and so we're going to discuss Venezuela instead.  Trump is already looking at hoping to expand into Canada and still trying to figure out how to acquire Greenland for all of the various resources they have, and Greenland has rare-earth minerals in abundance, more than any place outside China . . ..  We won't need them, because Trump has more or less made it impossible to sell electric vehicles in this country, but other countries will.

Progressive commentators insist that Trump has turned his back on his own followers, the forgotten men and women of the industrial heartland who wanted him to focus on Americans first and that they will, in turn, turn their back on Trump.  Not so fast.  Many of Trump's supporters are comfortable and well-employed and well-fed (though Steve Bannon isn't well-groomed or well-bathed), and they're all in on this escapade.  They'll immediately point out that Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan dictator, was despised not just by the Venezuelan people but by the whole world - not unlike Trump - and no one is shedding tears for his arrest and extradition.  Like, how can you argue with that?  You can't.  And Trump himself will quickly point out, if he hasn't already, that Maduro has been charged with narco-terrorism and cocaine importation, and that means one more drug runner out of business.  Such an argument would have more resonance coming from a President who did not pardon the drug-running former Honduran president for sending enough tons of cocaine to the States to kill as many "gringos" as possible.

And who will be running Venezuela in the time it takes for the Venezuelan people to establish a new government on their own?

These guys.

Gee, what could go wrong?

I suppose I could send the White House a strongly worded letter about this, but who do you think I am, Charles Ellis Schumer????

Americans don't want any more foreign invasions or nation-building.  I don't have much hope, however, for those who go out to protest this invasion.  Yes, it's about oil.  At least Trump, dishonest as he usually is, is honest enough to admit it.  But, as with the war in Iraq twenty years ago, if you are against wars for oil, don't show up at a demonstration in a large SUV unless it runs on electricity.    If you do have a gasoline-powered SUV with a "War Is Not the Answer" bumper sticker on it, I propose that you either remove the bumper sticker or convert your vehicle to run on biodiesel. 

War Crimes Against Humanity

I once noted that I thought that the idea of a war crime is a redundancy because all war is a crime.  But what happened three months ago today is not only a crime, it would be inexcusable if it were a war exercise.  The fact that it was likely perpetrated to provoke a war also makes it a crime.

On September 2, 2025, Secretary of War (or Defense) Pete Hegseth ordered a U.S. Navy strike on a Venezuelan boat that his office says was a drug-running boat bringing fentanyl to American shores.  The boat was nowhere near Florida, the northern Gulf Coast, or Texas but in the Caribbean Sea, just north of Venezuela - a long way to bring a bunch of crates full of pills.  Two survivors managed to emerge from the explosion, and Hegseth made it clear that both must be taken out.  They were.

That isn't a military operation; it's murder.  Hegseth (above, at work) violated several U.S. laws and violated the Geneva Convention, making the United States susceptible to international prosecution.  Trump is standing by Hegseth, and Hegseth is standing by Mitch Bradley, the admiral who gave the order to kill the two survivors of the attack.  But he's also devolving much of the responsibility to Admiral Bradley, thus absolving himself of all blame and leaving Bradley holding the bag. 

That way Hegseth can hold . . . his booze.   

Hegseth can't drink his way out of this one.  He cannot deflect blame for the murder of the two survivors to Admiral Bradley and all the boys back in the drink.  The Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired  by Roger Wicker (R-MS) with Jack Reed (D-RI) as the ranking minority member,  issued a statement vowing to conduct what they call "vigorous oversight" on the strikes in the Caribbean on  . . . well, they likely weren't drug runners.  They were more likely fishing boats, struck on orders from Hegseth with approval from Trump mainly to . . . provoke a war against Venezuela to get to its vast oil reserves?

I need a drink.

There's plenty of bipartisan disgust with Hegseth over this, but he does have his defenders . . . notably Megyn Kelly, who, having offered a quasi-defense of Jeffrey Epstein having sex with females who are almost women - that is, girls, spoke to Mark Halperin on her talk show and said that she would like nothing better than to see the survivors of the boar attack not just killed but tortured in the process so they can feel severe pain as punishment for running fentanyl to Americans, even though she has no more of an idea than anyone else as to whether or not these sailors were drug runners.  (I'll deal with Kelly more thoroughly later.)

With Kelly a prominent voice in the media and with Hegseth having an outsized role over civilian administration of the military, the rest of the world is pretty much convinced that America has descended into lawlessness and cruelty and sees no reason to trust again for a long, long time, even after Trump and his minions are gone.  And that is yet another reason why I keep advocating for the United States to be broken up into separate countries. 

And by the way, forget Canada, which has a lot less oil than Venezuela . . . I think Trump wants Venezuela to be the fifty-first state.  But, given Trump's record, I'll bet a lot of Venezuelans, given the choice would prefer to stick with Nicolas Maduro.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

I've been so busy commenting on the 2020 presidential election campaign (which, alas, is still very much in progress) and other issues here that I haven't found any space for any one of the numerous rebellions against the established order in so many other countries around the world.  I had always hoped to get to the unrest in one country or another, but I never did.  There were simply too many distractions.  Now, I realize, after having struggled for something trenchant to say about Hong Kong, Lebanon, or some other place like that, I realize I don't have to. Because the takeaway is obvious.

The whole world has gone mad!

Actually, it went mad decades ago, but for the first time since World War II, the madness has gone beyond the pale.  In Venezuela, there's a situation not unlike our own - a fundamentally flawed leader with backing form rank-and-file military members - Nicolas Maduro - refuses to step down despite growing opposition to his rule.  The standoff between him and opposition leader Juan Guaidó continues, but the American media lost interest in the crisis months ago - and not for reasons you might think.  They've since been distracted by other hot-spot stories around the globe, such as the protests against the cost of living and economic strain in Chile and in Iran, the fragile, corrupt government trying to mollify angry citizens in Lebanon, and the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong against its Chinese overlords, who want greater control over the administrative region even as Hong Kongers resist any threats to the autonomy granted to them by Beijing back when we Westerners were still calling it Peking, when the deal handing over Hong Kong from Britain to China was negotiated.  

And Iraq?  Well, as the former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, democracy is messy!

Perhaps the world isn't really all that mad.  Perhaps this is an extension of what we have seen in America in the form of the rise of Trump, in Britain with Brexit, and with France with the yellow vest protests. People are getting sick and tired of the elites screwing things up to the point where people's futures are uncertain and they act out as a form of protest.  For the most part, as with Trump and Brexit, this has only made the problem worse, and in places like Iraq, all anyone is accomplishing is contributing to climate change by burning all of those tires.  Heck, in Israel, the system is so paralyzed that even after two elections, no one has been able to form a government, and there might yet be a third election that resolves nothing.  Still, the people of all of these various countries are onto something here - nothing is working for them, and they're making a desperate effort to get things to work right for a change.

Just don't expect anything to be sorted out any time soon.

Except, maybe, in Hong Kong, were pro-democracy council candidates won power in a free and open contest.