I remember an article, long long ago, somewhere in 2006, where a liberal nutjob suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome was profiled. She would wake up early, because life under George W. Bush was just too much to deal with, then grab a non-alcoholic beer, chain-smoke, and wonder “what she should scream about this day”. Should it be about Bush, whom she considers “malevolent,” a “sociopath” and “the Antichrist”? She smokes another cigarette. Should it be about Vice President Cheney, whom she thinks of as “Satan,” or about Karl Rove, “the devil”? That was from the Washington Post, entitled The Left, Online and Outraged.
That’s what today’s opinion pages look like, the NEED to find something nutty and angry to write against Trump, especially when we get something like this from the Washington Post Editorial Board
The specter of civil war in Venezuela
MISERABLE AS the people of Venezuela may be under the increasingly repressive and irrational rule of the Nicolás Maduro regime, they had fresh reason for hope last week — until President Trump’s blundering words on Friday.
The Western Hemisphere’s democracies were rallying against Mr. Maduro’s latest power grab — a phony election to install a new, rubber-stamp legislature, accompanied by a crackdown on domestic opponents. In Lima, Peru, a 17-member bloc of countries, including Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Colombia, had condemned Mr. Maduro’s government and imposed diplomatic isolation upon it. This effectively formed an ad hoc alternative to the Organization of American States, which had previously failed to respond to the situation appropriately because of Venezuela’s co-optation of client states and leftist allies. Meanwhile, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights had decried a “breakdown of the rule of law†and pinned responsibility on “the highest levels of the government.â€
Then, with a stray remark, Mr. Trump set back much of this important diplomacy. Apparently oblivious to long-standing Latin American concerns about U.S. military intervention, he observed that his administration has “many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option, if necessary.†Perhaps his comment to reporters was intended as the usual “nothing is off the table†boilerplate; if so, it badly misfired. Mr. Trump’s bloviating immediately provided a shred of credibility to the Maduro regime’s conspiracy theories, which portray his domestic opponents as preparing the ground for Yankee intervention. Consequently, the new Peruvian-forged coalition had to waste precious time and political capital repudiating the American president, albeit not by name. “All foreign or domestic threats to resort to force undermine the goal of reinstating democratic governance in Venezuela, as well as the principles enshrined in the UN charter,†Peru’s foreign minister said.
If you’re guessing that the WPEB, which has almost never written about Venezuela, and were very approving of the previous wacko and authoritarian, Hugo Chavez, is now more Outraged by said boilerplate comment than about what the Venezuelan government is doing, you’d be correct. If you think they are magnifying the comment, conflating it to a threat to invade, you’d be correct. If you’re thinking that they wouldn’t criticize Obama in the same manner, you’d be correct.
Indeed, they do. To be sure, the damage Mr. Trump did is mostly intangible — but intangibles matter.
Fully stop. Nothing after that matters. This is simply the WPEB being part of the The Left, Online (and in bird cage liner) and Outraged, suffering from TDS. They even end the missive with the notion that Trump should not “enforce obedience on everyone else.” Interestingly, they did not have the same problem when Obama interfered in Lybia. Syria. When Russia invaded Crimea. Iran trying to build nukes. Etc.
Crossed at Right Wing News.
Republican Senators are mocking and ridiculing tRump’s stupid and irresponsible comment on military intervention in Venezuela.
Perhaps tRump has investments there, or perhaps some of his Mafia partners do.
Not sure what a military option would be in Venezuela. Going in, thrashing the Venezuelan army and hanging Nicolas Maduro from a lamp post would be emotionally satisfying, but it would unite a very divided country against the United States. Other than Monroe Doctrine concerns — and yes, we should enforce that, and keep China out of the Western hemisphere — we should allow socialism to continue to fail.
Eventually, the people of Venezuela will throw out all of the socialists who dragged them down this path, and people with brains will recognize that only capitalism makes any sense. They’ll invite American corporations to come in and revive their oil industry.
Of course, the warmists should like the chaos in Venezuela! After all, not only does Venezuela have some of the world’s largest proven petroleum reserves, it has the world’s worst oil reserves, being very ‘heavy’ petroleum, requiring much more refining to make it useful. The US exported 500,000 barrels of light, sweet crude to Venezuela every day, to blend with their own oil, to make it refinable. As Venezuela collapses, that heavy oil is taken out of the market.