More on Venezuela

The three best takes I've seen so far on the OAFPOTUS hoping anything is more interesting to the public than his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein start with Josh Marshall:

I don’t think there’s any actual reason we’re invading Venezuela or trying to decapitate its government or whatever we’re doing. I think there are two or three different factions in the government each pushing a very hostile policy toward Venezuela for differing reasons. Meanwhile, Trump thinks it’s cool and has a personal beef with Maduro. That combination of factors created a lot of forward momentum within the U.S. government with nothing pushing back in the opposite direction. That gets you to today. My point is that it’s a mistake to think there’s a “real” reason mixed in with other subterfuges and rationales, or that it’s important to find out which one the “real” reason is. It’s not that linear or logical.

The OAFPOTUS's press conference yesterday rattled James Fallows to the core:

1. Trump himself looked and sounded very bad. He slurred and slumped more than usual. His eyes fluttered many times toward seeming shut. He had trouble working his way through big words in the written script. His off-script riffs were from a very small span of his standard repertoire.

2. Trump made the case for his own impeachment. Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and others tried to dance around what had happened by saying that the Maduro capture and relocation from Venezuela was a routine law-enforcement exercise. Nothing to see here! We’re just executing another drug-crime arrest warrant, though with unusual skill from the American forces.

Trump was having none of this pussyfooting. Perhaps without realizing he was doing so, he flatly and 100% contradicted what others at the microphone were claiming.

Leaders in Congress should be talking frequently and openly about impeachment. Again, it won’t happen. But making clear that he deserves removal is important. (This is what Jack Smith’s newly released testimony is showing.)

Those who want to stir up tensions inside MAGA-world can instead talk about the 25^th Amendment, which would directly pit Team Trump against Team Vance.

One way or another, performances like Trump’s today cannot be normalized.

And Francis Fukuyama looks at the United States' track record with regime change and shakes his head:

The Trump administration may get plaudits in the short run for having removed Maduro, but will face a turbulent and potentially violent situation in Venezuela itself, as regime survivors try to protect themselves. Trump in his initial news conference after the intervention has said that the United States will run Venezuela directly for the time being. He doesn’t have the faintest idea what he is getting into.

Rather than focusing on the issue of the legality of intervention, we ought to focus on motives and outcomes. For better or worse, the use of force internationally is justified more often by the results it achieves than by its legality. There is a powerful moral argument to be made that Maduro was an illegitimate dictator, one who not only oppressed his own people, but destabilized the entire region by fostering criminal gangs and sending millions of countrymen fleeing into nearby countries.

Given the second Trump administration’s track record in its first year in office, I am unfortunately not counting on it to be either wise or effective in its management of a post-Maduro Venezuela. On behalf of my Venezuelan friends, I hope that I will be proven wrong about this.

History, indeed, returns as farce.