“I spent a chunk of the holiday week reading a new history of the Spanish-American War, which was in part a product of media prodding. The signature, probably apocryphal quote of the era, paraphrased in Citizen Kane, is reputed to have been said by William Randolph Hearst to photojournalist Frederic Remington, who was stationed at a sleepy outpost in Cuba. Remington hadn’t seen any signs of battle, he cabled to Hearst, who allegedly replied: “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”
While you were shoving the last of your Thanksgiving leftovers into the microwave, another war was being furnished, not by a media mogul or corporate titan—though certainly some defense contractors are counting up future bonuses inside their mansions in Northern Virginia. No, the secretary of state has been ginning up this conflict, and while the concept of a war for oil is more emotionally satisfying and probably a side benefit of the imminent incursion into Venezuela, the more appropriate way of thinking about it is a war for Marco Rubio’s right-wing South Florida exile friends.
Venezuela was used in the last presidential election as a way for Trump to attract skittish voters by scaring up visions of gangs taking over random slumlord complexes in Colorado. But Rubio, long a proponent of Venezuelan regime change, didn’t want things to end there. Appeasing his home state’s exile ring is a rather parochial origin story for an international incursion, but it happens to be true.
Trump was reportedly not buying the pitch until Rubio related it to something the president’s terminally 1980s brain recognizes: the war on drugs. Vaporizing alleged drug boats through summary executions, including what appears to be a patently illegal order of a second strike, has a visceral appeal for Trump. The inconvenient problem is that almost no fentanyl is produced in Venezuela, but fortunately for Rubio, Trump doesn’t read past the first page of the briefing book, and also doesn’t read that page either.
Invading Venezuela to stop drugs from flowing into America would be ridiculous even if Trump weren’t preparing to pardon former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, a convicted drug trafficker who once vowed to “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses” and helped move 500 tons of cocaine into the country. It’s part of a litany of drug dealers connected to Trumpworld, like cannabis distribution kingpin Jonathan Braun, whom Trump let out of jail with a commuted sentence and who is now back in jail again, or Orlando Cicilia, a convicted cocaine trafficker who is the former brother-in-law of … Marco Rubio.
I have a hard time believing Rubio is masterminding this when Trump already bristled against Venezuela is his first term.
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“I spent a chunk of the holiday week reading a new history of the Spanish-American War, which was in part a product of media prodding. The signature, probably apocryphal quote of the era, paraphrased in Citizen Kane, is reputed to have been said by William Randolph Hearst to photojournalist Frederic Remington, who was stationed at a sleepy outpost in Cuba. Remington hadn’t seen any signs of battle, he cabled to Hearst, who allegedly replied: “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”
While you were shoving the last of your Thanksgiving leftovers into the microwave, another war was being furnished, not by a media mogul or corporate titan—though certainly some defense contractors are counting up future bonuses inside their mansions in Northern Virginia. No, the secretary of state has been ginning up this conflict, and while the concept of a war for oil is more emotionally satisfying and probably a side benefit of the imminent incursion into Venezuela, the more appropriate way of thinking about it is a war for Marco Rubio’s right-wing South Florida exile friends.
Venezuela was used in the last presidential election as a way for Trump to attract skittish voters by scaring up visions of gangs taking over random slumlord complexes in Colorado. But Rubio, long a proponent of Venezuelan regime change, didn’t want things to end there. Appeasing his home state’s exile ring is a rather parochial origin story for an international incursion, but it happens to be true.
Trump was reportedly not buying the pitch until Rubio related it to something the president’s terminally 1980s brain recognizes: the war on drugs. Vaporizing alleged drug boats through summary executions, including what appears to be a patently illegal order of a second strike, has a visceral appeal for Trump. The inconvenient problem is that almost no fentanyl is produced in Venezuela, but fortunately for Rubio, Trump doesn’t read past the first page of the briefing book, and also doesn’t read that page either.
Invading Venezuela to stop drugs from flowing into America would be ridiculous even if Trump weren’t preparing to pardon former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, a convicted drug trafficker who once vowed to “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses” and helped move 500 tons of cocaine into the country. It’s part of a litany of drug dealers connected to Trumpworld, like cannabis distribution kingpin Jonathan Braun, whom Trump let out of jail with a commuted sentence and who is now back in jail again, or Orlando Cicilia, a convicted cocaine trafficker who is the former brother-in-law of … Marco Rubio.
I have a hard time believing Rubio is masterminding this when Trump already bristled against Venezuela is his first term.
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