Trump, just now: Military action not off the table for Venezuela

[pbrower2a]

Not sure if that is even necessary IMO.

Oh, it's totally unnecessary. Maduro has screwed up his country enough without our help, and any action beyond sanctions on individual officials (and maybe not even that) lets him scapegoat us for his country's problems and cement the still-present Chavismo base.

This. Wtf is Trump doing? All those people who thought that he was a dove and a non-interventionist should've thought about his bloated ego. Instead of thinking like a sane person, he'll keep trying to look like the alpha male with 'tough', brainless statements. And to think we could've had a level-headed woman who can think beyond her ego.

Even Adolf Hitler offered himself as a 'man of peace'. Criminals and other evil people are liars, which explains why J. Edgar Hoover could put so much of the effort in interrogation by the FBI on finding out who the truth-tellers are and who the liars are.

War to grab resources? That's what Saddam Hussein did in an effort to take over oil-rich southwestern Iran and in turn Kuwait. Few liked the Islamic Republic of Iran, but even Fidel Castro could see something very wrong with Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait.

America becomes the new Evil Empire if it does something to Venezuela or does a pre-emptive strike upon North Korea.

President Trump  is putting America at risk of a military coup. 

[pbrower2a]

Like with the North Korea situation, I still assume that Donald Trump is all not talk and no action. He's someone who likes to appear as the tough guy, while in fact he's quite the opposite. In that way, he's probably representative for many of his (middle-aged white male) voters.

As opposed to Barack Obama, who thinks much, talks little (but effectively), and strikes suddenly and forcefully.

[pbrower2a]

People who thought that Trump, whose appropriation of paleoconservative rhetoric during the campaign was blatantly disingenuous, was going to be a non-interventionist in office deluded themselves. Even if you ignore his statements about "killing [the terrorists'] families", the fact of the matter is that right-wing nationalism has always gone hand-in-hand with jingoism.

The Mossad, probably the last foreign secret service that I would want as an enemy, makes a big point of leaving wives and children alone.

We could at least be that decent. 

[pbrower2a]

Democracy, Trump-Pence style: government represents economic power. There will be plenty of economic activity, but an inordinate part of it will be economic rent. Economics is neo-colonialism at its purest, with the economy drained for foreign 'investors'.

Chavez and Maduro are awful, but so is Trump. Aggression and plunder are both war crimes.   

[pbrower2a]

Err...ok? "Aggression" is awfully ill-defined. Would Bill Clinton's intervention in Haiti then be equivalent to Russia's conquest of the Crimea?

The standard in practice is established in the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. Rescuing citizens from apparent danger (Grenada, Panama), supporting one faction against another (the USSR in Afghanistan) is not so clear. In Haiti, the American intent was to restore a lawfully-elected government. 

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Chavez was and Madura is dreadful. Political leaders have been convicted of ravaging their own economies, but those who do so often are convicted of more murderous crimes than extortion and embezzlement. It's even more blatantly plunder when a foreign power transfers private or public property to the foreign power or to privileged institutions within the foreign power. 

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Human rights are getting much shakier in America than they have been at any other time in American history. President Trump has constituencies that would support the stifling of dissent or postponing an election. His trivialization of violent, fascistic cliques is without precedent. Ask how things are three years from now -- or three-and-a-half years from now should he be re-elected.