It takes a lot for anything anybody in the Insane Clown Trump administration says to get my attention these days. The longtime Exxon-Mobil CEO and current United State Secretary of State Rex Tillerson did the trick with these 48 words two days ago: “We are evaluating all of our policy options as to what can we do to create a change of conditions where either Maduro decides he doesn’t have a future and wants to leave of his own accord or we can return the government processes back to their constitution.”
That is the United States’ top “diplomat” saying that a democratically elected head of sovereign state, Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro, must leave office or “we” – the U.S. government that is – will reserve the right to remove him (absurdly described as “return[ing]” the Venezuelan government “back to their constitution.”) It is a declaration of the United States’ presumed entitlement to conduct internationally criminal regime change, confident that it is exempt from global sanction or prosecution. Because we own the world and what we say goes – especially in our hemisphere. Capice?
Nobody should doubt that Tillerson is signaling Washington’s willingness to carry out a coup in Venezuela. The Bush administration tried and failed to do precisely that in April of 2002 – and Washington has never stopped waiting for its next best moment to depose the democratically elected socialist government there. That moment is now,…