Venezuela

Feel Better Now?


POST 1226
BSO Mastery

Sure, Trump is a constant tsunami of snow job, obfuscation and BSO (Bright, Shiny Object) distractions. He always needs them because of his blatantly illegal, unconstitutional, cruel, anti-America vice king blitzkrieg. There is nothing he won’t do to keep us looking somewhere else so that the Epstein files don’t reveal proof that he’s a pedophile and rapist. That’s particularly important, because his unquestioning MAGA supporters will tolerate grift, fraud, murder and much more, but they won’t tolerate his abusing and violating little girls.

He’s killed people in international waters where no U.S. law applies. That’s a lot like terrorism, maybe piracy. Those on the boats weren’t formally accused of anything. They weren’t indicted or arraigned and no evidence, much less proof of wrongdoing has been offered, All we have is the Liar In Chief saying there were drugs on board those boats. We can’t prove he’s a liar any more than he can prove he’s right because he killed nearly all the 4 dozen or so people who were supposed to be innocent until proven guilty and he sank the evidence. All that was done without a legal right to have taken any action against those boats or the people in them. And now he’s threatening a land invasion of a sovereign nation, Venezuela.

There was a story in the Miami Herald on Monday, Venezuela claims capture of CIA group, accuses U.S. of plotting ‘false flag’ attack. What makes this shocking is that it’s a believable story. Trump sending CIA operatives to Venezuela? Of course. Nothing distracts public attention like a land war and a huge show of force by our Naval warships. Nothing galvanizes citizens to back a president like a war. Nothing makes a president look like a strongman like – you guessed it – a war. It’s all so distracting.

So, who’s going to focus on the Epstein files after Trump has trumped up a phony war?

BSO Mastery Unmasked

Tearing down the East Wing of our national treasure, the White House, the one that belongs to We The People and not to the felon temporarily housed there, is a horrific violation of all that is right and good. President Real Estate Scam is getting away with this because Spineless Speaker Mike Johnson refuses to reconvene the House because doing so will require him to swear in and seat newly elected Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ).

She will be the 218th vote for the discharge petition to force the release of the Epstein files. Trump just cannot have that, so puppy dog Johnson manufactures fantasy reasons to refuse Grijalva’s swearing in. With the House AWOL, there is no possibility of Congress stopping anything Trump wants to do, including Gestapo cruelty in our streets, murdering people at sea, starting a war and tearing down the East Wing, all so that we don’t get to see that he’s a pedophile.

Fortunately, the folks at The Lincoln Project are adept at laying bare official misconduct and hypocrisy and they’ve done it again. Watch this AI video of Trump pitching his new, nobody-else-wants-the-damn-thing ballroom.

Q & A

A TV newscaster was asking why in this hyper-connected digital age aren’t more people agitated by official government cruelty to the point of taking action.

In part it’s because so many things online have a cartoon-ish vibe, a sense of “it isn’t real – it’s just the internet.” There’s a lack of depth and solidity to such stuff. When a report comes to us about people dying, it’s almost as if they are cartoon characters or actors in a movie who can go home after shooting their film for the day. We are left unmoved by the not-quite-real perception, so the outrage we should feel over a terrible real event doesn’t materialize in a fully human dimension.

There are roughly 330 million of us, 32% of whom are MAGA types, leaving 224 million who are not MAGA types. If 7 million show up at the NO KINGS rallies, where were the other 217 million Americans who believe that cruelty is being done in their names and who want change for the better? Why do they stay home?

Maybe, in part, because all the bad stuff doesn’t feel quite real to them. Plus, leaders have lied to them over and over, saying it’s just “fake news.”

Democrats Don’t Get a Free Pass

The Democrats are led by inept, uninspiring men, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. They offer far too little for us to get excited about. The most patriotic thing each of them can do is to step down from leadership so that real leaders can step up to save us from Republican cruelty. We need new leaders with fire in their bellies to rail against:

ICE cruelty in the streets of Chicago and Portland. Speak from where ICE is brutalizing citizens, not from a safe lectern downtown Tell everyone, “We stand with We The People!” Shout it out that ICE goons and the goons who sent them hate America and Americans.

Trump’s stupid tariffs and inept economics that are bankrupting farmers and impoverishing the rest of us. Go to red states, Democratic firebrands, and declare that we stand with farmers. Do it from a soybean field that won’t get harvested. Tell We The People that’s because Trump has driven away our markets for soybeans. The silos are full and there is no place to put this year’s harvest. Get former Sen. Jon Tester, an actual farmer, to do the talking.

Trump’s ICE thugs who have emptied the produce fields of people doing stoop labor that you’d never do. You’re going to pay double for your fruits and vegetables if you can get them at all. Firebrands, say that on camera in a supermarket with half-empty shelves.

Want to know why Democrats lose elections? It’s because they don’t have the best people leading the charge, they don’t present much that people can identify with (please, no more heady policy!) and they present themselves as wimps. And everybody knows that wimps always get the snot beaten out of them and they lose their lunch money to the cruel playground bullies.

Who will punch the bullies in the nose? We need an answer very quickly.

We Don’t Want You To Worry

With this Republican, Trump-powered federal government shut down, paired with all the defunding that has already happened and furloughs of people we have counted on, millions of formerly productive, fairly paid Americans are going without a paycheck. This is happening now. Moms, dads, kids – really everyone – is or soon will be liquidating retirement savings, rationing food and avoiding all but emergency healthcare.

But you shouldn’t worry. Even as the government is shut down and millions are forced into despair about how they’ll make the house and car payments, how they’ll feed and clothe their kids, our manipulative, lazy-ass Republicans in Congress are being paid their full salaries for refusing to do their jobs, as is Donald Trump. They are and will continue to be financially sound without a money care in the world.

Feel better now?

Mid-Term Election
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Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
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Venezuela and Existential Threats


Reading time – 5:07; Viewing time – 7:30  .  .  .

First, my only comment on the topic of the cherry picked, sentence fragmented Mueller report is that I want the full report – all of it including the appendices – both for the complete, un-predigested information so that I can draw my own conclusions and so that we won’t imagine a Justice Department cover up engineered by Trump’s hand-picked protector.

As of this writing Attorney General Barr has indicated he will release the complete Mueller report by mid-April. There will be redactions, perhaps lots of them. Some will be to protect ongoing investigations. Some redactions will be for national security reasons. Some will be to avoid causing embarrassment to “peripheral innocent people.” I have no clue why that’s more important than instilling confidence in the report for a skeptical public. Absent such confidence, we’re facing an existential threat to our democracy.

If you need insightful commentary on the entire Russia issue, including Mueller’s report, read pal Dan Wallace’s comments. Now to the issue of Venezuela.

The Wall Street Journal ran a story about Russia’s power play in Venezuela. Putin sent 100 troops there to prop up dictator Nicolás Maduro. In reaction to that, reader JC asked if there was anyone left in Washington who understands the Monroe Doctrine or remembers the Cuban Missile Crisis. My answers: no and no.

As you’ll recall from high school American history class, the Monroe Doctrine prohibits further European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere.

At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev was cultivating Cuba as a client state, effectively making it a colony of the Soviet Union, the very thing prohibited by the Monroe Doctrine. Soviet missiles armed with nuclear warheads on that island made it an existential threat to the United States.

While President James Monroe couldn’t have imagined nuclear weapons, he and his contemporaries were clear that the presence of European military might this close to home was an existential threat to our nascent country. The Monroe Doctrine was and is about our national security.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis there were thoughtful, careful men in charge who insisted upon best intelligence and carefully considered approaches to the challenges we faced. They had the strength of character to resist knee-jerk military actions and they prevented a catastrophic war.

This time there’s a reality TV personality in charge who doesn’t read, who is incapable of assembling complex thoughts, who doesn’t review the President’s Daily Brief, so he doesn’t know what’s going on, who doesn’t have sufficient self-control to resist temper tantrums and who needs to be seen as the biggest, baddest tough guy. He is supported by Secretary of State John Bolton, who never saw a conflict he didn’t want to escalate into war. As bad, we have a horrendous record of starting conflicts without any plan to end them.

For example, George W. Bush dim-brain/lied us into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with phantom promises of quick success and happily-ever-after flowers tossed at our troops by Iraqis. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared Iraqi oil would pay for the whole thing. None of that happened.

What was foreseeable but which they refused to foresee was the global refugee problem they triggered and which the world lives with quite unsteadily now. It is a key outfall of Bush’s lies and we still don’t have a plan to end those wars.

Now that Russia has sent its troops into Venezuela we are in a situation not unlike the Cuban Missile threat from the Soviet Union. President Trump backs Maduro’s challenger Juan Guaidó. How will Trump stop Russia from both keeping Maduro in power and from having that military foothold in the Western Hemisphere that is specifically forbidden by the Monroe Doctrine?

In point of fact, Trump has been a disaster of a negotiator for the U.S. He’s been a patsy with nothing to show for his capitulations to Russia and North Korea. Worse, he’s been a lapdog for Putin, who is now threatening Trump’s tough guy posturing.

Trump has told Putin to back off. If Trump tries to negotiate with Putin to get him to do that, Trump’s past negotiating prowess suggests that it probably will look like hollow posturing that leaves Russian troops in place in Venezuela with an escalating military presence in the Western Hemisphere. If instead Trump sends troops in support of Guaidó, we’ll be faced off against the Russians and troops on both sides are likely to be killed. And there won’t be an exit plan from the conflict.

What could possibly go wrong?

And another thing  .  .  .

The Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee called for Adam Schiff (D-CA) to resign his chairmanship of the committee, based on the same kind of Republican partisan brainlessness that we’ve seen for years. Schiff replied with a kind of muscular statement rarely heard from Democrats. Watch the whole thing here.

Last thing .  .  .

Chris Hayes interviewed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“AOC”) on Friday. Here’s a link to a string of videos from that interview. I urge you to watch all of them for one reason. It’s not so that you’ll agree with or find ways to pick apart the Green New Deal or find ways to cheer or criticize her. I want you to think on a higher level.

Specifically, watch and listen in order to understand why she has so completely captured the public imagination. Our Gen X, Y and Z citizens see our politics in the way that Emma Gonzalez sees our embedded intransigence over gun safety: “We call B.S.”

AOC speaks for an overwhelming majority of Americans, regardless of how much you may fundamentally disagree with her policy ideas or fear your own loss of power.

To Our Legislators:

Get on board with working with people who see the future far differently than you do. If you don’t want to do that, I suggest that you polish your résumé in preparation for entry into an exciting new career. That’s because these folks know that they’ll be the ones who will live with the consequences of what we’re creating right now, so they have a far more powerful interest in a sustainable future. We have created an existential threat to them and they won’t let us mess it up any more.

                   ————————————

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Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

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