WHAT WOULD DONALD Trump have to do for the U.S. media to frame what he is doing in Venezuela as an act of war?
This isn’t a rhetorical question. It’s an actual inquiry, the pursuit of which can reveal a lot about how U.S. media’s default posture is state subservience and stenography. In the past few months, President Trump has committed several clear acts of war against Venezuela, including: murdering — in cold blood — scores of its citizens, hijacking its ships, stealing its resources, issuing a naval blockade, and attacking its ports. Then in a stunning escalation on early Saturday morning, the administration invaded Venezuela’s sovereign territory, bombing several buildings, killing at least 40 more of its citizens, kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife from their bed, and announcing they will, henceforth, “run” the country.
This episode seems to indicate that the president can do almost anything in the context of foreign policy, and the media will still overwhelmingly adopt language that is flattering and sanitizing to the administration when describing what has unfolded. This dynamic reached a new low Saturday morning, when the U.S. media rushed to frame the administration’s unprovoked attack as, at worst, a “ratcheted up” (CBS News) “pressure campaign” (Wall Street Journal) and, as was more often the case, some type of limited narcotics police “operation” (CNN).
A) They didn’t up the bounty for his arrest. They upped the reward for legitimate information that could be used to support having him arrested. Since Biden never gave that bounty to anyone and didn’t arrest him or request he be arrested, then that should trigger in your thinking process that there is a huge fucking difference in policy between “We are investigating whether it is legally valid to pursue narco-terrorism charges against a world leader who we think did not win a legitimate election” and “We are invading a nation to capture a person to bring to trial without showing any evidence.”
B) That link was about getting information leading to his legal arrest through international cooperation in a court system, not about unilaterally deciding to invade a country and kill a bunch of people to extract a high value target.
A) First, I don’t know if you can be even more clueless to understand what “information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of Maduro” refers to. Do you think that just means a bounty that doesn’t get enforced? It literally is to there to provide information to assist the US in arresting Maduro.
B) Ah yeah, I forgot they were going to send in the international police to arrest him despite not having an arrest warrant by the ICC. I do know of one person that had an arrest warrant by the ICC though that Biden was very friendly with, sending money & weapons to help murder children while his admin vetoed bills to stop the genocide.