Why we must invade (checks notes) Venezuela

At this point, the Trump administration seems fairly bent on the notion that the United States should be doing a Military Something to Venezuela. We don't know what the "something" might be, and there has been a conspicuous hole in the discourse where, usually, an administration's hawks and allied pundits would pompously lie about the reasons why their newest war was necessary.

The absence of any such arguments suggests that Team Trump doesn't itself know why they want the war or what problem it would supposedly solve. They just know that they've been placed in charge of bombing things, so it's time to bomb something.

So it's been left to every Republican suck-up to invent their own justifications for why Trump should get his new war. Republicans being Republicans, that hasn't been going well.

Here's Rep. Maria Salazar giving her take.

There's something uncanny about Salazar's argument, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

“Venezuela—for the American oil companies—will be a field day. Because it will be more than a trillion dollars in economic activity. American companies can go in and fix the whole oil rigs,” she said. [...]

“We’re gonna be doing a favor to us, to our children, to our economy, to our oil companies, and to the Venezuelans.”

So to tick through this, then:

• We should invade Venezuela to take their oil.

• And the war will pay for itself.

• Not just pay for itself, but be a tremendous economic boon!

• And Venezuelans will greet as liberators.

• And future us will thank us for having the wisdom to do it.

Once American oil companies have free run of the place, they'll be able to teach the people of [insert country here] how government should be run, and there will be flowers and rainbows and nobody will ever regret it, not even the families who sent their children to die for the cause, and this isn't like [name of previous war] because this time we'll send in the cream of the crop, Heritage Foundation interns, to manage the finances and do governing things.

Now if she just would have muttered something about how we know where the fentanyl stockpiles are, and that they're east, west, south, and north of Tikrit, she would have won the day's secret prize and a rubber chicken would have dropped from the studio ceiling.

The thing about Salazar's argument is that while it may be (ahem) extremely derivative, it still counts as a fleshed-out-albeit-evil rationale. The White House itself has doggedly avoiding giving any rationale of their own, probably because Secretary Of Drinks Pete Hegseth and Secretary of Genocide Stephen Miller are still flinging food each other in the world's most embarrassing "national security" slapfight.

There hasn't been a decision on whether to bomb Venezuela a few times and call it done, or whether to launch a ground war for the purposes of regime change, or to skip the whole thing and just bomb a few towns in Mexico because it's closer and the drones can stop to buy souvenirs before crossing back over the border. Administration war-wanters have mostly settled on the premise that they are in a "war" with illicit drug manufacturers, specifically drugs that aren't made in Venezuela but in friendlier countries like Columbia and Mexico, but neither of those countries would appreciate warships off their coastlines so Venezuela it is.

Venezuela, home of the largest proven oil reserves in the world. Venezuela, important exporter of oil, drugs, communism, and grandmas who aren't afraid to slap you if you piss them off.

I think, in the end, the actual rationale for any administration escalation of the current random boat murders in the Gulf of Mexico and Pacific is simple, very simple, and that is the problem. Donald Trump is old, crabby, worried about his legacy and angling for a peace prize, and to him the quickest way to a peace prize feels like bombing something and declaring victory because the man is a stone-cold idiot, through and through.

Pete Hegseth, in the meantime, is an alcoholic would-be social media influencer who wants military valor even more than he wants Pabst; he wants to stand in front of a Patton flag, as often as possible in fact, and say dramatic things to a room full of people not allowed to laugh at him.

So there's the only real reasons for "war," that and Stephen Miller running out of frozen rats to gnaw on and getting increasingly agitated about that, and having to backfill reasons that don't seem incandescently stupid is proving to be a massive undertaking for this collection of memelords and Nazi-adjacents. It has proven, so far, to be beyond their capabilities.

As for Rep. Maria Salazar, though, I'm going to provide what I imagine will be a controversial take on why Salazar went on television to talk about invading a country for the sake of controlling their oil, though. I don't think she meant to do it.

Consider: Former Vice President Dick Cheney died three weeks ago. His funeral was held just last week.

Consider: Only days after Cheney was buried, Rep. Maria Salazar appears on television—but her pupils suddenly dilate, her head begins to shake violently, and she begins mouthing words about oil companies and regime change.

Coincidence? Perhaps.

OR PERHAPS NOT.