Look, I’ll come right out and say that if anyone needs to be kidnapped at dead of night and black-bagged on board a U.S. Navy ship to face a trial for all sorts of unspeakable bastardy, that Commie rat VenezPres Nicky Maduro would rest comfortably in the top ten.
What amazes me is that with all the domestic bastardy we have right here in the U.S. of A., why does it seem to be easier to arrest someone in South America than to do the same to, oh, Somalian fraudsters, Congressional thieves… and ne’er-do-wells like [pause to take a deep breath] George Soros, Barack Obama, Eric Swalwell, Ilhan Omar, the Clintons etc. etc. etc.?
In other words, can we at least start to get some of the well-known local assholes into orange jumpsuits before venturing into furrin countries?
Because — and here’s a parallel thought — I have to say that unless the DOJ has some serious goods on Maduro, and by this I mean evidence of actual crimes that he has committed against U.S. citizens, I’m profoundly uneasy that we can just grab the leader of a foreign state, bring him Over Here and book him. (I know, there’s the Noriega Precedent for this kind of thing.)
I mean, what’s BritPM Keir Two-Tier Starmer? Chopped liver? Surely he should have been ahead of Maduro on the list of kidnappees? [pause to let the storms of applause from my Brit Readers die down]
And if we’re going to nab Maduro for shipping the eeeevil droggs to the U.S., what about the Mexican drug exporters? (Okay, maybe they’re better-protected than Maduro, but still.)
All that said, if one of the end goals of this action is to make the other South American assholes (like that Colombian Commie tool) uneasy about their future prospects, then I can see why Generalissimo Trump dun wot he dun.
I was and still am appalled by the way the US is blatantly violating pretty much every law and treaty in existence when it comes to Venezuela.
First piracy on the high seas (boarding and stealing oil tankers and destroying ships just because someone might be on board with drugs) , and now kidnapping citizens of an independent country when there is no state of war.
At this point the US’s behaviour in the Caribbean is no different than that of the Houthis in the Red Sea, or the Somali pirates off their coast!
I can’t stand Maduro and his regime, but that doesn’t justify an act of war against his country.
If this gets accepted as normal by the international community, what’s to stop any country from doing the same to any other country just because they don’t like someone there?
What’s for example to stop the Canadian military from grabbing JD Vance?
Or the Chinese from grabbing Trump?
A LOT of people all over the world would be happy to see those two gone, I can tell you that. I wouldn’t mind seeing them gone, but not through those means. Let them get kicked out in a democratic and fair election.
Maduro lost the last election(the opposition party presented clear & compelling evidence they won), but retained power at gunpoint.
I would remind everyone here that Pres Obama was the first US Pres to impose meaningful sanctions on Venezuela, and Pres Biden put a $25 million bounty on Maduro’s head.
That is internal affairs of a sovereign nation, if we interfere in the internal affairs of any sovereign nation by kidnapping its leaders just because we don’t like them, what do you think would happen?
There are many unelected leaders, or leaders who probably corrupted election results, are we going to kidnap all of them?
It’s past time the USA stopped attempts (all of them failures btw) at “nation building” and started actually cleaning up its own affairs and being an ally to its supporters (Canada, Denmark, Europe in general, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc. etc.).
Do keep in mind that Chavez seized the assets of numerous American companies. They would like them back, or at least to be compensated for them.
Additionally, Maduro recently started “playing footsie” with Iran & Hezbollah, you might google Margaretta Island.
He also had plans to place Chinese missiles in Venezuela, did you not notice that he met with Chinese advisors right before he got snatched?
As for Delta snatching Maduro, I note that apparently some Special Forces operators do not know the proper protocol to use when you have South American Marxist officials in your helicopter…..
There has never been anything preventing any of those things. “International law” is a fiction and always has been.
Maduro is a thug who has impoverished his country, abolished the legislature, killed his opponents, kept power after losing two elections, made his country a center of International crime amd terrorism. He got what he deserved and it is utterly lawful.
This was not about the drugs, at least entirely. Drugs were a big part of it, and the narco-terrorist problem is second only to the Islamowhacko terrorist problem. But th drugs were the excuse to put legal cover on this thing.
The real reasons behind it were to eliminate Russian, Chinese, and Iranian influence in our hemisphere. And I, for one, am not the LEAST bit perturbed by International Law concerns “Oh nooooooeees!” So much international law is bullshit, I’m really very unconcerned by it.
I don’t need to recount all that was going on down there by the aforementioned miscreants there’s tons of analysis on the Intarwebz, spend a little time digging around it yourself. It was a problem that was only going to grow larger, and I, for one, am glad The Donald had the stones to say, “Enough!” Good on him.
Now, I do share Kim’s concern that we don’t see a lot of local talent in orange jumpsuits. That needs to happen, and quickly. I get the sense that the MAGA community is tiring of the foot-dragging. The typical finger wagging and LET’S HOLD HEARINGS! Bullshit on the Republican side is growing tiresome. Get on with it already.
Plenty of problems here in the US to deal with without delving into other countries.
Drugs coming into the US?
Secure the fucking borders!!!
Pull ALL US military from ALL countries and station them all along the borders. (In the army I pulled lots of border guard on the east german border (1974-77). If US soldiers can do it over there, why not here?
In the absence of secure US borders nothing else matters, and, it proves the worldwide criminal intent of the US gov’t.
I’ll agree that snatching Maduro is not a good thing in terms of setting a precedent, but sometimes you need to follow thru and actually do things you threaten to do. Otherwise nobody will believe you are serious. We’ve been rattling our saber for sometime in the Caribbean. It shouldn’t have been a big surprise.
Now that we have their attention, maybe the rest of South America will listen better. Time will tell – It;s still really early.
But this is what I voted for …. A President who actually does the things he promised to do.
Manny Noriega was snatched in 1989 or so which has set precedent. We also removed the Taliban from Afghanistan then unfortunately restored them to power. We also toppled Quadaffi who posed little threat to anyone. We also toppled Sadam Hussein which should have been done in 1991.
Removing Maduro was long overdue. I thought this was one reason why the CIA was formed in the 1940s. We kept the Communists out of power in Italy for quite a while. We toppled the Iranian regime in the 1950s as well. I would have thought that the CIA’s mission during the Cold War would have been to topple communist regimes around the world. Unfortunately we backed too many totalitarians who gladly accepted money from the growing illegal drug trade. I’m sure the CIA found these funds desirable so they could finance whatever plans they had without getting approval from Congress. oh what a tangled web.
We should be helping South American countries have clean and fair elections. We should do that at home too.
Overall I’m tired as hell of all this. But we’ve been pulling this shit since at least Teddy Roosevelt if not earlier, and I don’t know if our interventions have helped or made things worse. I want to exist in a live-let-live world, but the chicoms and Russians, won’t keep their grubby fingers off of shit either, so are we wrong or right to play along. I don’t really know.
I wouldn’t piss on Maduro or his ilk if they burst into flames in front of me, and I know a few (2 precisely) Venezuelans that are happy as hell about this, and I’m sympathetic to them.
But my concern overall is there seems to be a great deal of rushing and very little treading, and I guess at this point it’s a fait-accompli, so we just as a populace have to live with it now.
I’ll probably get some flack for this, but I trace most of our problems today back to TR & Woodrow Wilson and their attempt to get the US involved in world affairs, that we’d have best been left out of.