Neocon Central is battered but not beaten these days. The rise of Trump has split the rock in half, but only when it comes to Trump himself. On other issues, the rock remains firm.
A useful example has just presented itself, the claim made by both the Trump-hating Washington Post and the Trump-friendly Eli Lake, holding forth in the non-Trump-friendly confines of “Bloomberg Opinion”. According to the Post, “Don’t call it a coup. Venezuelans have a right to replace an oppressive, toxic regime”, while Eli “explains” that “There Is No Coup in Venezuela”.
Well, there was no coup in Venezuela—no successful one, at least. A couple of days ago, Juan Guaidó, opposition leader to the grotesquely incompetent and murderous regime of President Nicolás Maduro, posted an online video of himself “at a military air base—flanked by soldiers and the imprisoned opposition figure Leopoldo López, apparently freed by security forces from house arrest—announcing the “final phase of Operation Freedom” in partnership with Venezuela’s “main military units,” ahead of planned protests on May 1” (quoting from Uri Friedman’s article, “How an Elaborate Plan to Topple Venezuela’s President Went Wrong” in the Atlantic Monthly).
But that was the highpoint of Juan’s day. The “major military units” didn’t show, and, as Friedman explains, the Trump Administration, along with the Washington Post and Eli, who thought they had the whole thing in the bag, ended up with egg on their faces. Which is better than blood, which is what is now on the faces of Venezuelans. This regime change thing looks so easy on paper. Well, the next time for sure!
Hello Washington Post and hello Eli Lake. Stop being as stupid as Donald Trump. Stop upending other people’s lives to work out your fantasies of “absolute power”.
Afterwords
Everyone (everyone except for a couple of compulsively stupid leftists) realizes the horror that has been unleashed by the grossly brutal, corrupt, and incompetent governments of first Hugo Chávez and then Nicolás Maduro. But foisting “regime change” from the outside has been uniformly disastrous every time it’s been tried. If only people would listen to Daniel Larison. But he makes far too much sense.
