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Trump is obviously gearing up for some kind of military action in Venezuela. As a bully, a coward and someone who knows that protracted war is unpopular, but freedom bombs are popular, he’ll probably just bomb the shit out of the place.
Mark Kelly is making some good noise — and also raising money for his run in 2028 — as the designated victim of Trump’s bullying. He’s and his fellow veterans are doing a good job by committing the thought crime of simply reading the Uniform Code of Military Justice’s rules on illegal orders.
But here’s the thing: not only is what Trump is doing illegal, it’s also stupid:
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Coast Guard announced Thursday it seized nearly 510,000 pounds of cocaine in the Eastern Pacific Ocean and Caribbean during fiscal year 2025 (FY25), the largest amount in the Service’s history.
On average, the Coast Guard seizes 167,000 pounds of cocaine annually. The amount seized in FY25 is over three times that amount, and equivalent to 193 million potentially lethal doses (1.2 grams), enough to endanger over half of the U.S. population.
I’d love to see someone say that our brave Coast Guard is already seizing a literally tons of drugs without killing people. In fact, they catch these low-level players and can extract whatever intelligence they’re able to provide (I’m guessing it’s precious little).
This is one of those instances where polling isn’t going to show the way. Americans have a media diet of movies and TV plots where the only way to really catch bad guys is to break the law, repeatedly. (One of the big ones in this genre is Tayler Sheridan’s Sicarios and the sequel, but there are hundreds of others.) Fox and other right-wing networks are gonna love them some violence, legal or not. And people are angry about the flow of drugs and the toll of opiate addiction.
But if we can show, which we can, that all of the murder and mayhem is mostly killing fisherman who have few other options, and that freedom bombs are going to kill innocent Venezuelans, and that all of that killing is illegal, it’s more bad news for Trump.
And, yeah, I know that the 27% or 34% or whatever the hard core of Trump’s base is nowadays won’t hear this message, and they’ll somehow believe that simultaneously bombing Venezuela while pardoning the cocaine kingpin former President of Honduras somehow makes sense, but they aren’t the persuadables.
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