You know how I said my New Year’s Resolution was to not focus so much on Trump?
So much for that idea.
Overnight between Friday and Saturday morning, the Prince of Peace invaded Venezuela. That in itself is not a surprise, given that our Simple Simon Bolivar has been telegraphing moves against that country for most of his first year back in office. What amazes me is that it worked. Apparently they dropped in some commandos and captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, and are hauling them back to the States on charges of machine gun possession, drug smuggling and other stuff that Boss Trump doesn’t seem to mind if you’re rich enough to bribe him for a pardon.
And sure, even some Republicans are sputtering over the fact that their President is acting without Congressional approval, but we had several votes come up before this to invoke the War Powers Act and they didn’t vote for it then. Trump operates, always has operated, under the old saying “it is better to get forgiveness than permission.” Just DO the thing, and permission is moot. After all, we’ve already done it, and it’s going to be a lot harder to undo. Same thing as getting rid of USAID, the Department of Education, the East Wing, all of it. So in the next few days Trump’s media shills are going to go on full court press to tell us all that anybody who opposes this new campaign for freedom is a Commie Muslim atheist tranny who just hates Our Lord Donald Trump, America’s Greatest President since Jesus Himself.
And our Liberal Media has been showing several incidents of locals cheering in the streets because Maduro is gone, but anybody who thinks this country cares about liberty, especially under our own wannabe dictator, is going to be very disappointed by the new management. These guys are less altruistic than Ayn Rand.
Speaking of whom, Rand did say that a free nation needs no permission to liberate a collectivist slave state, and few people would dispute that Maduro was running a collectivist slave state, but then that being the case, and given that we are clearly not acting on ideological motives, it comes back to the question of who benefits.
Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves but has had only about 1 percent of the global output, partially due to US sanctions and largely due to mismanagement of facilities. In his press conference, where he sounded more wheezy, slurred and fatigued than ever, Trump openly declared that the country would be directly managed by the US on behalf of our oil companies. There was of course no mention of María Corina Machado, the right-wing opposition leader whom many observers thought won Venezuela’s last election, won the Nobel Peace Prize of 2025 (in exile) and publicly said that Trump should have gotten it. I am posting the transcript of Trump’s “speech” here in order to spare the reader Trump’s Whiny Mafioso With Sleep Apnea voice. Given again how much potential the territory could yield compared to current production, there might indeed be room for improvement.
But it’s just like thinking you can get rich in Las Vegas. The trick is not to make the money, the trick is to get out of town with it. It was almost as easy to conquer Iraq because that country was also a human rights nightmare and people were glad to see us come. But then we decided we didn’t need stuff like a local support base, let alone an exit strategy, because while in theory we were going to liberate the population, in practice all the connected people in the Bush Junior Administration were going to run the place as an industrial colony for the Empire. And that’s what strengthened the guerrilla campaigns against us, because whatever our troops on the ground wanted, they weren’t there to save orphans and give them Hershey bars. And they of course paid the cost, along with hundreds of thousands of locals. And keep in mind, the Bush people actually DID have some folks who believed their own hype about Iraqi Freedom. Trump clearly just wants to treat an entire country as his personal property, and his underlings make the Bush team look as competent as the actual British Empire. And they didn’t last forever either.
The difference is that Iraq was hot, humid and infested with guerrillas but was a nice, open desert for our troops to operate in. Venezuela is hot, humid, infested with guerrillas and a country consisting mostly of deep jungle with a coastline.
Can anybody say “Vietnam”, boys and girls?
Not like Trump would have any experience with that place.
The real disturbing aspect of this invasion is not that this is somehow a break with precedent. Of all Trump’s aggressions, invading a Latin American country is one of the more typical examples of American foreign policy. This is NOT a new action in American history. Remember when we invaded Panama and captured Noriega, just cause we could? When Reagan invaded Grenada in the Caribbean and overthrew its President, just cause he could?
No, nobody remembers. Because nobody reads history. This country can’t even learn from its own Goddamn history. That’s why Trump loves the poorly educated. Who else would elect him?
To paraphrase again from Ayn Rand, what this country needs to do is not preserve the Constitution, but to discover it, because we haven’t been running things according to the Constitution for quite some time. And if the first year of Trump II: Electric Boogaloo didn’t make it clear that that approach to government is reaching an unsustainable point, his Vietnam II is going to make it that much more clear. But since it’s also becoming clear that the Congress and the media won’t treat this as anything more than another Surprising Plot Twist episode of The Trump Show, this country may have to completely destroy itself in order for us to start fresh. It’s starting to look like a better and better idea. Maybe if we didn’t call ourselves “The United States of America” we’d quit assuming we had a legacy right to invade people in this hemisphere.
Of course that raises the question of what we call ourselves. America is taken. Columbia is taken. I don’t think most of us would appreciate being called California and All These Other Guys.
Personally, I’m partial to “Freedonia.”