So welcome to the podcast. This is episode 412, 412. My name is Douglas Wilson. Here I am, and there you are. So I want to begin, last week I talked about all things Iran. This week I want to talk about all things Venezuela. And this is a little bit more complicated. This one is a little bit more tangled, if you will.

Iran's on the other side of the world. The people are restive. They are rioting, demonstrating.

And you would have to lay out a pretty thorough argument to show the connection between helping the protesters and American national interest.

I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm just saying it would be a much more complicated thing to do with Iran than it would be with Venezuela. Venezuela is right in our

backyard and it has massive oil reserves. They have basically emptied out because of their

economic lunacy, economic policies, the communist approach to things.

Venezuela has basically emptied out.

Many of the refugees who have come to the United States, a lot of our problems on the

southern border have been Venezuelans fleeing the socialist paradise.

You then have the additional factor of the drug cartels. Basically,

Maduro was a drug lord who had seized control of a country as an apparatus. It's, you know,

it's a lot of people will say, well, there's a sovereign head of state, and why did Trump

kidnap a sovereign head of state without a declaration of war from Congress?

It's sort of like, let's say you had a hostage situation where some thug captured a house

and was holding the husband, the father of the house,

at gunpoint in the house. It was a hostage showdown situation, and the wife and the kids were

there terrified, not knowing what to do, and the cops are all outside. And let's say the man taking the

family hostage in the house was saying things like, I'm the head of the house now. I'm the

husband. I'm the true husband. I'm the true father. And the SWAT team about to go in doesn't buy

that. The fact that you've got a gun pointed at the head of the

house doesn't make you the head of the house. It makes you the de facto head of the house. Everybody

inside is currently obeying you. But basically what you had within Venezuela was a drug cartel,

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