here’s what it looks like when a mob boss takes over your country

‘fuck you, pay me.’

you know that inside Preznit Fuckwit’s big dumb pumpkin head, he fancies himself to be a smooth, sophisticated businessman. a businessman like no one thought possible. maybe the greatest businessman of all time.

oh please. Donny isn’t any kind of businessman.

what he is, is a tin-plate penny-ante mobster from Queens, New York. he walks like a mobster, he talks like a mobster, he looks like a mobster — and above all, he acts like a mobster. he always has, and he always will.

Donny’s shittacular mobsterism was on full display yesterday, when he phoned a writer at The Atlantic and started barking threats.

In a telephone interview this morning, President Donald Trump issued a not-so-veiled threat against the new Venezuelan leader, Delcy Rodríguez, saying that “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro,” referring to Nicolás Maduro, now residing in a New York City jail cell. Trump made clear that he would not stand for Rodríguez’s defiant rejection of the armed U.S. intervention that resulted in Maduro’s capture.

oh, how completely fucking charming — Donny’s making an offer that Delcy Rodríquez can’t refuse.

this isn’t the way heads of state speak. it’s the way mobsters speak. and that’s quite a threat — ‘if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.’

Maduro just got kidnapped, handcuffed and blindfolded, hijacked out of his own country, and flown halfway the fuck across the continent. he’s currently sitting in some hellhole Brooklyn jailhouse, awaiting arraignment on drug trafficking and weapons charges. what’s a bigger ‘price’ that than that? is this a death threat?

like any good mobster, Tony doesn’t come right out and say what that bigger price is. he leaves it up to the imagination. nice country you got here. be a real shame if anything were to happen to it.

whoops, did I just say Tony? I meant to say Donny. where did that come from? what a weird Freudian slip.

but you know what Donny’s plan for Venezuela sounds like most? it sounds like what the mob does to a restaurant when it decides to take over.

as Henry Hill so eloquently put it in Goodfellas, fuck you, pay me.

“Now the guy’s got Paulie as a partner. But now the guy’s got to come up with Paulie’s money every week. No matter what. Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. The place got hit by lightning, huh? Fuck you, pay me. Also, Paulie could do anything. Especially run up bills on the joint’s credit. And why not? Nobody’s gonna pay for it anyway. And as soon as the deliveries are made in the front door, you move the stuff out the back and sell it at a discount. You take a two hundred dollar case of booze and you sell it for a hundred. It doesn’t matter. It’s all profit. And then finally, when there’s nothing left, when you can’t borrow another buck from the bank or buy another case of booze, you bust the joint out. You light a match.”

that’s Donny’s plan for Venezuela — to drain it of its wealth — oil, minerals, whatever — and when all that shit runs dry, put a match to it.

I can’t stop seeing parallels between what’s going on now in Venezuela and what happened during the run-up to the debacle in Iraq.

remember how everyone involved in perpetrating the Iraq War had their own particular reason for doing so?

— George W. Bush wanted to prove to his father that he wasn’t a fuck-up. (maybe someday we can stop electing presidents who have daddy issues.)

— Dick Cheney wanted the oil.

— Paul Wolfowitz and his merry band of neocons wanted to prove that their crackpot economic theories would turn Iraq into a free market paradise.

— and Michael Ledeen simply got off on being a bully.

“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business,” Goldberg remembered Ledeen saying in an early 1990s speech.

and now, the same bullshit is going on with Venezuela (and the greater western hemisphere).

— Donny Mobsterpants just wants all the power, all the money, and all the attention.

— Liddle Marco wants to be The Savior Who Liberated Cuba.

— and Flippy McCrushnuts? who even knows what fucked-up childhood trauma led him down the road to desperately needing to prove he’s the warfightingest warfighter to have ever fought a war.

Donny and his toadies are high on their own supply right now. they’ve got exactly one very partial victory under their belt — the extraction of Maduro — and now they’re running around, punching their fists in the air and posturing as if they’ve already won all the wars.

spoiler alert: they haven’t. beyond bullying Rodríquez, they don’t have a plan.

look, Maduro’s entire government is still in place. as Robert Reich wrote last night,

U.S. troops are not prepared to occupy Venezuela. Trying to do so would be a disaster.

Maduro’s system of oppression is still entrenched there. It includes the national guard, the army, the national police, the intelligence service, and the Colombian guerrilla group ELN. All remain intact.

Maduro’s top lieutenants also remain, including several who were involved in his alleged crimes. Not to mention his thugs and narco-traffickers who have been controlling Venezuela through violent repression and stolen elections.

so what happens when threats don’t work? don’t ask Commander Bone Spurs. he hasn’t thought any of this shit through.

no, he’s already busy fighting the next ten wars.

Trump in a single gaggle on Air Force One just threatened:
— a second strike against Venezuela
— Cuba
— Mexico
— Colombia
— Iran
— Greenland (which in turn would be an attack on the EU and Denmark)

an attack on Greenland would in fact be an attack on NATO. imagine the implications.

what a fucking idiot. act first, think never. yeah, that’ll work.

here’s a fun meme that’s been going around social media. I don’t know who created it, so I don’t know who to credit.

you fucking well know that this is exactly how Donny sees the world — because here’s an item that you could be forgiven for having forgotten about, swept away in the firehose of fuckery that never stops spraying in our faces.

remember Fiona Hill?

during Donny’s first reign, Hill was Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs. she had a front-row seat to all the underhanded shit Donny was trying to pull.

on October 14, 2019, she testified before a closed-door joint Congressional meeting of Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Committee on Oversight and Reform, and the Committee on Foreign Affairs. here’s a lovely passage from that testimony.

“And the Russians at this particular juncture were signaling very strongly that they wanted to somehow make some very strange swap arrangement between Venezuela and Ukraine…. You know, you have your Monroe doctrine. You want us out of your backyard. Well, you know, we have our own version of this. You’re in our backyard in Ukraine….”

just a couple of mob bosses, splitting up their respective territories, as mob bosses do.

---

look, everything is moving at a million miles an hour in all different directions right now, and it can all seem overwhelming — but take heart.

Donny is still a fuck-up. he can’t fight ten wars at once. he hasn’t even finished fighting the first one. he’s going to fuck this up, just like he fucked up the real estate empire he inherited. just like he fucked up running an airline. and casinos. and on and on.

I promise you, there is light at the end of the tunnel. just as with his failed domestic policies, none of Donny’s gunboat adventurism is popular. is bombing Venezuela going to lower the cost of groceries? fuck no, it isn’t. is invading Cuba going to make healthcare magically affordable? of course not. none of those problems are going away. they’re only going to get worse. this is going to be a political disaster for Donny — and for Republicans.

the midterm elections are on the horizon. should the Democrats retake Congress, there is going to be a reckoning.

let me quote historian Timothy Snyder here, because he says it so much better than I can.

Trump is weak at home, and he can be stopped — so long as the domestic political logic of foreign intervention is recognized and turned against him. This act of war is more about regime change in the United States than it was about anything in Venezuela. It only succeeds as fascism if Americans allow it to do so. If journalists and judges recognize the connection between foreign adventures and domestic authoritarianism, an act of violence abroad will discredit rather than accelerate our own transition towards authoritarianism. And with some work and some luck, we will get to our own next elections.

hang in there.

someday this war’s gonna end.

---

here’s your daily reminder that I can be found on Blue Sky at this link.

---

this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.

952 / 1041