Posted on 07/30/2017 7:56:07 PM PDT by Enlightened1
(Excerpt) Read more at thegatewaypundit.com ...
I pray wisdom to Donald Trump about how to address situations like this.
He only has so much stick and so much carrot to work with. Is he going to wage war against Venezuela? Just sanctions have a way of steeling the resolve of these communist disasters that they are on the high road against the horrible capitalists. And there are other parties in the world that would gladly, if cynically, take Venezuela under their wing.
Unless somehow it impacts the US I think we should just stay out of it and let the regional countries around Venezuela handle the problem should there be one.
I hope he does not wage a war. President Trump already has North Korea, ISIS and China on his plate.
Where is the OAS on this? Are they still even around?
Theoretically speaking, the lure of an example of a revived America would probably be the best carrot that Donald could dangle.
The only communist regime we really pushed into submission was the old USSR, and that was because it was too big and burdensome to be manageable by Russia anymore. Russia saw the virtues of becoming capitalist and shedding all that stuff. They called it glasnost.
We don’t have an analogous situation here. Venezuela is Venezuela. Something else is going to have to get these little knots of communism to budge.
“Is he going to wage war against Venezuela?”
Hopefully this isn’t necessary, but at least he had the courage and character to call what is going on in Venezuela what it is, totalitarianism. It’s not just a phrase, all that it takes for evil to win is for good people to do nothing. There are people starving in Venezuela, and a dictator who ignores their desires and their needs. I don’t know the geopolitics of central and south America, but if possible I would try to form a coalition of American states against this dictatorship. That would buy legitimacy for any other necessary actions.
Very commendable, but in the end this is All talk, no action.
Maduro showing that it IS possible for a President to get things done.
Not that what this retarded bus driver is doing is good, it’s horrible for the people, but they voted Chavez in and this is his hand picked successor , thems the breaks when you have Universal Suffrage and vote in communists.
Maduro didn’t let the Supreme Court or the Legislature get in HIS way.
Here’s the catch in that Burkean motto.
No one is good but God. If the current sad state of the USA is the best that can be offered to Venezuela as the proxy for Jesus, I could hardly blame Venezuela for saying no.
Why can't he just cut off all 'funding' to the 'illegitimate' government ?
Reagan certainly found success with that tactic.
Unless enough of the people of Venezuela can grasp and accept Plan B vis a vis Maduro’s Plan A, nothing is going to happen.
And America can’t be a hypocrite here, or it won’t sell Plan B.
We ultimately have a faith problem in this world. Christendom, in its various arms (Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant) built most of the modernized world. Even places that restrict it tend to ape the practices of places that don’t.
But the gospel is at perilously low belief levels now.
While it is indeed a sad situation, I can’t help but recall that the people of Venezuela voted for this socialism when they first voted for Hugo Chavez.
The vote came at a time when a temporary prosperity (the oil sales of Venezuela) made the choice seem of little practical consequence except to make things a bit easier. Ya know, share the profits. Nothing wrong with that, as long as there ARE profits... the problem is what do they do when the profits perish. Everybody is pointing fingers at each other when the collective enterprise fails, and there’s no freedom for individual enterprise. A sad, sad trap.
“No one is good but God.”
No one is all good but God, but there is good in all, and in my opinion a free will to choose between the good in us and the bad. Ego, the draw of power, and ignoring or profiting from the suffering of others are things we can choose to avoid and to fight. That doesn’t make us ‘all good’, but at least we choose to take the side of good.
That said, I agree that as a nation right now we are not exactly a model of ethics and morality.
The point here is that those who “believe in goodness” should never presume they are in fact good people; at best they are saved, bad people. And they should be pointing at God and confessing their own need of God at the same time as touting His benefits.
A witness like that might sell to Venezuela. Where we are, wouldn’t.
Like it or not, our modern left with its secular liberalism arose as a force that filled the vacuum where sacred liberality went AWOL. Secular liberalism is like Robin Hood except worse. It steals from the poor too and skims from the top before it ostentatiously doles out its benefits.
Venezuelans could rightly point at America now and say that its leftism isn’t any “worse” than ours, it’s just arranged differently.
There is nothing the U.S. can do about this. Ans even getting involved is only going to strengthen Maduro’s position.
You forgot one enemy, the Democrats.
The U.S. doesn’t give any aid to Venezuela. The U.S. has poor relations with Venezuela. Chavez and Maduro didn’t like Obama any better than Bush.
The only real exit is a sufficiently good carrot.
That might have still existed in Reagan’s day, but it was about to wilt. America has lost its way, has forgotten the God that illuminated it.
Donald has to dutifully criticize it, but he can’t really exhort it to do better without the ball and chain of being a spokesman of a yet hypocritical country. The best he could POSSIBLY even TRY would be “Venezuela, why don’t you try thus and such.” Where thus and such is better than even where America is.
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