Venezuela??

 I’ve got a cold. Pam got it last week right after Christmas. Now it’s my turn. It’s not horrible but for the past two nights sleep has been rough. This morning I woke up around 4:30, stumbled downstairs with a killer sore throat, then opened my computer to news that my country had attacked Venezuela and captured its leader. What the actual hell? 

I should point out that it is a terrible idea to read the news when you feel like crap. You need to be at the top of your game to tackle the news anymore. I probably should have waited until I had a good breakfast, took a shower and done my exercises…but that ship has sailed. Instead, I was confronted with this bizarre news after only one sip of coffee with a throat that felt like it was lined with cayenne pepper.

What do I even know about Venezuela? Let’s see…I know that it used to be one of the richest countries in Central and South America before they decided to try a Cuba-styled communist/authoriarian government under Hugo Chavez. To the surprise of absolutely no one who isn’t a tenured professor or a journalist, Venezuela is now a financial and human rights basket case despite the fact that they have the largest known oil reserves on the planet. That’s really really hard to do! The current dictator is Nicolas Maduro, a dude who somehow has managed to be even more incompetent and anti-democratic than Chavez. 

Also…Venezuela produces a ton of really great baseball players.

Like most other South American and Central American nations, Venezuela produces tons of drugs. The climate is perfect for it, I’m told. Most of the drugs are smuggled into and consumed by us…the United States of America, since we can’t seem to get enough drugs no matter where they come from.

So now we have apparently attacked the capital with aircraft and managed to snatch Maduro and his wife, who have been flown here to stand trial for a 2020 narco-terrorism charge filed in New York. Details on just how our military managed this remarkable feat remain hidden at this hour. What also remains unclear is what vital national interests of the United States is in play here which would justify a military intervention. I mean if its drugs…we could have done the same thing to Mexico, Columbia, Nicaragua etc etc…

But our President is Donald Trump. Trying to figure out his motivations is like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle in the dark. It might just be the baseball thing. Maybe Trump is fed up with the ever increasing number of Venezuelans in the big leagues? Or it could be another in a long line of wag the dog military operations that presidents with sagging approval numbers have engaged in for the past hundred years or so.

But…it’s early. As I type these words this particular adventure is mere hours old. By the time most of you read this there will have been several more social media posts from the President with more details. No matter what the reasoning proves to be—we are once again involving ourselves in what used to be called..war…with another country. This is almost always bad news for everyone.