Earlier this morning here at The Hayride, Walt Garlington put up a rather curious piece decrying the midnight raid in Caracas on Saturday which nabbed Venezuela’s narco-terrorist dictator Nicolas Maduro and secured him to be tried on a five-year-old federal indictment for drug trafficking. Maduro and his wife had the cuffs slapped on them, they were read their rights and they were put on a helicopter to the USS Iwo Jima, which was a seaborne way station to their eventual destination of either New York or Miami where Maduro will be tried.

Garlington seems to have missed those facts completely, instead caterwauling about the unsuitability of the federal government to build an empire and quoting, of all people, John C. Calhoun, the antebellum senator from South Carolina who was the foremost apologist and shill for slavery, as an admonishment against conquering Latin America.

Everything about this is wrong. Garlington may be coming about his insecurity over the Maduro raid from a good place, which is to be less than sanguine over an overreach by the U.S. federal government, but it’s a profound failure of judgment to begin tilting at windmills on that score when what’s actually happening, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted several times over the weekend, is the U.S. military assisting American law enforcement in making an arrest.

And as Rubio also noted, in doing so we did not depose a foreign leader. Nicolas Maduro was not the legitimate head of state in Venezuela. It’s universally understood that he stole the 2024 election in that country – the opposition ticket of Edmundo Gonzalez Urretia and Maria Corina Machado won overwhelmingly, and yet through a collection of nefarious means which will no doubt be studied and dissected in concert with the practice of many other elections around the world (for a very illuminating, if hair-raising, treatment of this issue, let me recommend Stolen Elections: The Takedown Of Democracies Worldwide by Ralph Pezzulo and Gary Berntsen, available at Amazon). As a function of that fact, Maduro was not recognized as the legitimate leader of that country by the U.S. government or lots of others around the world. He was a common criminal.

Or, perhaps better understood, an uncommon criminal.

As Berntsen noted in interviews promoting the book he and Pezzulo wrote, Maduro sat atop Cartel de los Soles, the criminal syndicate his regime controlled and directed to control much if not most of the international cocaine trade. Cartel de los Soles is so named because instead of stars on their epaulets, officers of the Venezuelan military have suns – los soles. It’s the Venezuelan military which controls the harvest, processing and export of cocaine both domestically and in neighboring countries like Colombia and Peru. Cartel de los Soles is reportedly worth as much as $2.7 trillion. It’s the richest criminal syndicate in world history. Because of that fact, it cannot be dealt with piecemeal in easily-corruptible courts here and elsewhere in the world.

And it isn’t some new revelation that Maduro was the top figure in that cartel. He was indicted in 2020. The Biden administration had put a $25 million bounty on his head, a number which grew to $50 million.

But Biden didn’t do anything about Maduro. Didn’t lift a finger. Instead he de-sanctioned Venezuelan oil for a time, and then watched Maduro steal an election. And Biden also opened our southern border, which let millions and millions of illegal aliens come across it to take up residence here. The number one nationality of those coming into the country through the Biden invasion? Venezuelan.

Some of that was a function of the dire straits the Maduro regime has placed that country in. Some eight million Venezuelans have taken to the roads, scattering all over the world; it’s no surprise that a large number of them would make their way here, especially with the border open. But embedded within that migration were agents of the Maduro regime.

Here we’re speaking about Tren de Aragua, the cartel thug operation which embedded itself in cities across America to take control of the cocaine trade in this country. Death and mayhem followed wherever TdA’s thugs showed up, and in many places – Aurora, Colorado being just one example – they overwhelmed local law enforcement.

That’s best described as a criminal insurgency by a regime which for 20 years, dating back to Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez, has been prosecuting a clandestine, asymmetrical war against the United States as the hegemon in the Western Hemisphere. Venezuela has been aggressively exporting narco-communist revolution in Latin America, with the help of international villains like Russia, China and Iran.

None of this stuff is opinion. It’s well-established fact. Everybody knows it.

And again, Maduro wasn’t deposed. He’s not the legitimate leader of that country. He’s a usurper who stole an election, and he’s an indicted drug trafficker who was arrested to face the music in an American court. Maduro’s vice president Dulcy Rodriguez, who is also illegitimate – he appointed her; she wasn’t elected – was sworn in following his arrest. We have not deposed that regime, though as Trump said in his press conference on Saturday it’s going to be the U.S. government supervising the transition to a legitimate government in Venezuela.

Is that imperialism?

If you want to make that complaint, at least be honest about your position. Because Venezuela under Maduro, and under Chavez before him, might have styled itself as independent from American influence – and they made that awfully clear when that regime expropriated billions of dollars in oil infrastructure that U.S. companies had built and were producing oil through based on legal contracts duly negotiated with that country’s government – but they were hardly independent.

Venezuela has been a political and military colony of Cuba for the whole of this century.

Some 32 Cubans were killed in the raid on the military base where Maduro lived in order to effect his capture. It turns out that some 15,000 Cuban military and intelligence operatives work in service to the Venezuelan regime. Some say the Cubans actually control the regime and have for a couple of decades now. The arrangement between Cuba and Venezuela has it that Cuba gets Venezuelan oil in exchange for “services” – doctors, engineers, managers and so on – the Cuban regime provides to Venezuela. But that isn’t what actually happens. What actually happens is that Cuba exploits Venezuela’s raw materials and sustains and profits from those at the expense of the Venezuelan people who are terrorized by a Cuba-supervised, tyrannical puppet government in Caracas.

That doesn’t even touch on the other “allies” of the Venezuelans. Like for example Iran, which has operatives all over Venezuela. Iran-sponsored Hezbollah has been running a terrorist training base on the island of Margarita, which is controlled by Venezuela, for years. Or Russia. Or China.

So it’s OK for the Cubans to exercise imperialism over Venezuela but not for the US to do it?

Which is not at all in evidence, by the way. When Trump said “we’ll run it,” he was rather inartfully describing the restoration of the badly-deteriorated Venezuelan oil infrastructure and putting that industry back into full production after the communists had mostly destroyed it, giving the Venezuelan people a chance to profit from the estimated $17 trillion in oil and gas reserves under the ground there, and making the American companies whole who’d had their assets stolen from them. We’re well within our rights to do that, and it’s certainly in our national interest to do so.

It should be understood that when Venezuela’s oil industry was the envy of the Western Hemisphere a couple of decades ago, a large amount of that oil was refined on the Gulf Coast here in America. That mostly serviced the U.S. market. Don’t be shocked if those refineries roll back in to full capacity and we start exporting gasoline and other petroleum-based finished goods to the world.

Perhaps that means Venezuela’s future is as an economic colony of the U.S.A. Are you really upset at the injustice of that when the alternative is they’re a colony of Cuba and/or China? Because those are the options. You’ve seen what happens to an “independent” Venezuela.

Fundamentally, we’re charging ourselves with restoring market democracy to a country which has been fighting a war against us from inside our own borders. Trump didn’t start a war with Venezuela; hopefully he finished one.

I’m not calling Garlington an enemy. He’s simply missing the forest for the trees. But others? They’re making it very clear who they are and what side they’re on.

I could regale the reader with countless statements made by members of a certain political party whose advocacy of certain electoral processes resemble quite strongly those of the Maduro regime. I’ll simply distill those into the persona of one locally-relevant individual…

Democratic Congressman Troy Carter shared his disapproval, writing, “Trump’s military actions against Venezuela last night were unconstitutional. Period. This was reckless and risked American lives with no plan for the aftermath.”

Carter went on to say, “The Constitution is clear. The power to authorize the use of military force rests with Congress. No president, regardless of party, may bypass that responsibility. Acting without congressional authorization is not strength. It is recklessness, and it places American lives at unnecessary risk.”

Troy Carter doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt with these remarks. Troy Carter gave not one fig about the countless unconstitutional actions the Biden administration perpetrated both overseas and domestically. And he’s even more off-base than Garlington in focusing on the military aspect of what was, at base, a law enforcement action. We didn’t invade Venezuela, though at Trump’s press conference on Saturday it was made clear that further military action was very much possible in the future. We staged a raid to arrest a drug kingpin.

Does Troy Carter have anything nice to say about that? No. Why, one wonders?

He’s complaining about how  we “risked American lives.” But no American lives were lost in the Maduro raid. Why isn’t Troy Carter proud of our military forces who were able to carry out such a daring operation with no loss of either life or equipment? That’s a miraculous, flawless performance.

He complains about Trump placing lives at unnecessary risk, but what’s his take on Tren de Aragua staging New Jack City-style takeovers of apartment complexes in American cities to consolidate the distribution of poisons that kill hundreds of thousands of Americans every year? That’s fine?

Would it have been worthwhile to get Congressional approval for military action against Venezuela? I certainly don’t oppose the effort in a general sense. My biggest concern with that idea is today’s Democrat Party, exemplified by Troy Carter, is aligned much more with Maduro than with the people of these united states. The coziness of the American Left with Chavez and Maduro goes back more than two decades now, and the actions of Democrats are progressively harder to understand outside of the framework of their having been bought and paid for by the cartels – the largest one being the property and tool of the regime being disestablished in Venezuela.

And so as the transition back to legitimate government in Venezuela begins, perhaps Trump should seek Congressional approval to use military assets to secure that country. It might be fun to watch Democrats like Troy Carter make arguments in favor of narco-terrorism as a viable, just alternative to market democracy and the rule of law.

But getting Congressional approval to have the military assist law enforcement in apprehending a suspect under indictment? That’s a stretch, and it calls into question the true motives of Carter and those like him.

And, as I’ve said, it’s no longer viable to give Troy Carter the benefit of the doubt.

I’ll give it to Garlington, for now.

But if you can’t see the Venezuelans dancing in the streets as they throw off the yoke of the Maduro regime and prepare for a freer, more prosperous and peaceful national life following what could well be a messy transition – who knows how those Cubans and others will be sent packing, after all – and realize what Trump did over the weekend was an unalloyed good thing, something even the Washington Post was able to do, then either your judgment or your motives ought to be questioned.