re: Trumps war on Venezuela

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Why are we really doing this? Is this all a precursor to a war that would make the Iraq war look legitimate and justified? In other words, is this all setting us up for a regime change war against Venezuela?

Adam Smith

It’s broader than that. Let’s separate this into three categories. One, legitimate concern. We’ve got a drug problem in the U.S. A drug problem that has accelerated since the introduction of fentanyl, which has a higher overdose death rate, certainly than cocaine, than a variety of other drugs. This has nothing to do with fentanyl. Remember that. This is all cocaine, no fentanyl down there. They’ll try to say fentanyl at every step. In fact, I had to stop Admiral Bradley a couple times when he mentioned, I said, this… don’t say the word fentanyl, it doesn’t have anything to do with fentanyl. Okay, so we do have drugs. What should we do about that drug problem in general? So we can talk about that. Second, you know, do we want to obey the law, or is one of our options, in terms of dealing with drugs, to go, sort of, forgive me, all Duterte on the problem, and just kill a bunch of people? No due process, no, it’s like, drugs are a problem, therefore, we’re not going to take any chances. We think you’re a drug dealer, we’re going to use lethal force on you. That is directly contradictory to the U.S. Constitution and the way we’re supposed to do things, but we’re gonna have that conversation. But the big thing that’s going on here is Trump’s desire to consolidate power in his hands, number one, and number two, to dominate the Western Hemisphere in a 19th century sphere of influence sort of way, alright? The drugs, I don’t think, are central to what he’s doing. You’ve got the pardon of the former Honduran president as evidence, which, by the way, that pardon seems to be tied to Trump’s desire to affect the outcome the elections in Honduras, so that a pro-Trump person can be elected. And this goes back to, we’re going to invade Greenland, because it’s part of our sphere of influence, we’re going to invade Panama, we’re going to annex Canada. It’s this 19th century way of looking at the world. So I think this is about Trump wanting to, A, show, again, law doesn’t apply to him. He’s president, he does what he wants to do. If he can push the boundaries of that and smash him, then that opens up more power for him to do what he wants, and second, that he will be able to control the Western Hemisphere. Maduro is not on his positive list there, neither is Petro in Colombia, so he wants to put pressure on them. ultimately, hopefully do regime change in both places so we can have a more sympathetic leader down there, and that’s what this is about. And we’ve talked about the Honduras person. I keep trying to bring up, no one seems to want to take this up, you remember Ross Albrecht, the Silk Road crypto guy? This guy basically used the secret nature of cryptocurrency and a secure app to launder billions of dollars in drug money and other illegal, illicit activity as well, but that’s what he was convicted of. He was laundering drug money. That guy had every little bit as much to do with spreading drugs across the United States of America as Maduro or these 24 anarcho-terrorist groups did. Trump pardoned him. You know, because he was a political supporter, and he’d promised the crypto goons that he’d do that. So… you know, this doesn’t, to my mind, have a lot to do with interdicting the drug problem in the U.S. It has to do with asserting Trump’s power personally, so he doesn’t have to obey the law. And second, his whole sphere of influence. And then, to make my friend Simon Rosenberg happy, I always tie this in to Ukraine. All right. Why did he offer up a surrender agreement to Putin? And why in the national security strategy does a threat from Russia not even mention? Okay, we crap all over Europe in that for a variety of different reasons. Don’t even see Putin as a threat, because if Trump gets his Western Hemisphere, what does he care if Putin gets his Eastern Europe? And that… and then I could go off on a long conversation about how we developed our national security policy to change all of that. To come up with post-World War II rules-based order that tried to respect sovereignty, tried to get us out of the business of, as was aptly described by somebody, I don’t remember who said it, you know, the strong take what they want, the weak suffer what they must. That was the world prior to the end of World War II. And that world led to endless wars, terrible poverty, mass death, 70 million people died in World War II at the culmination of that way of looking at the world. No rules, just power. That’s the world that Trump wants to create, and that’s what this is about a hell of a lot more than it is the impact that cocaine being shipped into the United States is having, which is admittedly very negative and something we ought to do about. I have ideas on how we should actually address that issue, but like I said, it’s really more about the power dynamic.

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so what you’ve heard from Senator Cotton and some others is simply false. That is not an accurate depiction of what was going on in the boat.

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Now, I find that fantastical in the first place, because a boat, you see the first strike, whole thing’s on fire. It breaks in half, it goes down. Is it

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Nahhh, he's just a cocksucker.

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We get tired of the farmers whining and looking for handouts.

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Not as tired as the rest of us get of you teat sucklers whining and looking for handouts

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