The fat farting fuhrer is on the warpath again. (Literally). Fiddlesticks, or something to that effect that also begins with the same letter.
Once again, for reasons best known only to him and perhaps his dark web chat buds, he has chosen to disrupt a perfectly dull and dreary stay-at-home weekend, a truth pretty much anywhere in the country you might be in unless you happen to love torrential rain, frigid temperatures or record snow. Here’s how the skeleton crew at one of his favorite news soiurces–NPR–summed it up yesterday morning:
President Trump said the U.S. will run Venezuela until a “proper transition can take place,” said he wasn’t “afraid of boots on the ground,” and defended Saturday’s military strikes that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.
“We’re there now, but we’re going to stay until such time as the proper transition can take place,” Trump told reporters from Mar-a-Lago in Florida. “So we’re going to stay until such time as we’re going to run it, essentially, until such time as a proper transition can take place.”
Trump’s remarks cap a dramatic few hours that began with reports of explosions in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, the scale of which became apparent only when the president said Maduro and his wife had been captured.
The subsequent perp walk and breaking news updates seeing Maduro chained up like an errant Home Depot employee came straight out of the same director’s handbook that Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem have been operating out of for months. Great clickbait, though.
Immediately the endless debate, chatter and opinion pieces began to dominate the airwaves and social media feeds. An hour’s worth of the victory lap dance that he and his uber-loyal toadies including “Little” Marco Rubio and the inexplicably central cast “Raising” Caine took provided more than enough fodder for it all. The blind devotees bought into the narrative that this was a freedom mission designed to liberate a country under the thumb of a dictator; the TDSers immediately cited constiutional law and precedent chapter and verse as to how this was all somehow once again proof positive that democracy was dead, and those somewhat more balanced accepted the “practical” rationale that his rampling speech somehow wound up fixated on:
The president made clear he expects the U.S. to sell seized oil assets and said he expects money will both go to Venezuela as well as the U.S. “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela, and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela, and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country,” Trump said. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country, and we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so,” he said.
Yeah, sorry not sorry, I can’t accept even that’s the answer. I acknowledge that the man has never shied away from something he considers to be a good deal, and one would offer that anyone who’d take over the South Bronx to build a championship golf course would be attracted to underdeveloped real estate. But after reading between the lines and becoming nauseated by his blather, I’d offer two more simplistic reasons why we’ve somehow chosen to go on an offensive.
One, of course, is the storyline behind WAG THE DOG. Do note that these images were among the latest dump of court-ordered release from the coveted Epstein Files, and since pictures say at least a thousand words these were millions that avoided being redcated. Methinks there’s lots of ‘splainin’ to do, Loocie. I mean, when was the last time your feet were worked on by anyone who seemingly has English as their primary language. We’ll allow for the moment that the young lady of legal age.
The other lies more in his telltale way of dismissively sneering at anything that seems to drive his naked ambition for attention and revenge. This particular praise of the “mission” caught my eye:
Earlier Trump told Fox & Friends that he watched the “extremely complex” operation unfold “like I was watching a television show.”
Just like a certain predecessor did–with an actual crowd of associates–on an equally dull weekend day nearly 15 years ago. HISTORY.com’s Julie Marks did a nice job retelling the nearly twelve-hour timeline of Operation Neptune Spear. All under the watchful eye of the Nobel Prize-winning dude with the middle name Hussein that rolls off his tongue with slobber and spittle usually reserved of late for the word “affordability”.
The same Nobel Prize that was recently bestowed upon someone a lot more local and qualified to “run” Venezuela than he–only not in his book, per ABC NEWS; Mary Kekatos:
Trump said the leader of the Venezuelan opposition doesn’t have the “respect” of the country to govern following the ousting of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Corina Machado celebrated the operation and capture in a statement, calling it the “hour of freedom.” Trump, who said he has not been in contact with Machado, said during a press conference on Saturday that he doesn’t believe she can assume the leadership role in Venezuela. “I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect,” Trump said.
Yes, we can all see what he thinks women are best qualified for. And how dare someone who’s supposedly married to a man somehow have the honor and reputation he is constantly being told is a mandate from both the American people and Jesus Himself.
For what it’s worth, there are formidable viewpoints to the contrary out there for one to ponder, including this well-formed one authored by THE ROOT’s Tatsha Robertson:
Some of Trump’s supporters might well see the Maduro raid as akin to Obama’s decision to send Seal Team 6 in to get Osama bin Laden. This ain’t that: Bin Laden directed an attack that killed 3,000 Americans. The world cheered when it was clear bin Laden was dead.
Trump’s Maduro raid is more like when the U.S. and its allies cleared the way for the Shah to come to power in 1950s Iran. We wanted that nation’s oil and installed a guy who made sure Iran’s oil industry wouldn’t be nationalized. It’s also like when Panama was created in the early 20th Century. The U.S. wanted a canal in that area and didn’t want to deal with the Colombians, who controlled the isthmus. So, our country backed forces that wanted to establish an independent nation – one that, shock of shocks, would be A-OK with a canal being built there.
Fair points, and with pretext that goes hand in hand with the Monroe Doctrine. I’m sure you remember it from your schooling better than he does since it was a long time ago that it was covered in his curriculum (assuming, of course, he was paying attention in the first place).
But as his new favorite non-Fake News source CBS reported in the wake of Operation Neptune Spear, there’s an even bigger reward out there in the offing in the wake of whatever yesterday’s mission winds up being dubbed:
A new CBS News/New York Times poll shows President Obama’s overall approval rating has jumped by an impressive 11 percentage points in the wake of the U.S. military mission which killed Osama bin Laden, and there is overwhelming support for how Mr. Obama handled the situation. The poll found that 57 percent of Americans generally approve of Mr. Obama in the wake of the raid in Pakistan. Two weeks ago, when bin Laden was still America’s most-wanted terrorist, the president’s overall approval rating was at 46 percent.
We’ll see what they and other report now since Nielsen ratings alone won’t tell the story of this “television show”. And given his minions’ penchant for spinning data in their favor in a manner not seen since the glory days of syndicated television (have you seen their version of the Kennedy Center Honors’ telecast’s performance?!?!!) , I’m confident we will have some version of similar biased hype being infiltrated into the next ten months’ worth of diatribes and dither. At least until the Nobel committee makes their next choice.
Until next time…
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