I wrote the title to this post before I had any idea what I was going to write about. The title seems to fit every possible topic.

The latest news about the drug boats in the Caribbean is being touted this morning by the media as if it is the latest news, but I remember it being discussed from the very beginning, although I did see a nuanced discussion yesterday. That is the apparently clear fact that none of the boats that we have attacked were coming to the United States. They were all going to much closer ports in other countries. So, it’s not like it is simply an alternative to the Coast Guard boarding a vessel in our territorial waters, capturing drugs and sending the boatmen back to where they came from. It is much different, and the difference is not only in the obvious different treatment of those men on the boats.

The focus has been on the one boat where the two “survivors” were de-survived. My assumption has been that this boat was on its way to Trinidad, where its cargo would be unloaded and somehow put on another boat, or maybe a plane, and brought to the United States, although how this would be accomplished was never explained. But I think it was clear that the boat(s) in question could not have gone far beyond Trinidad. It did not have the fuel to go that much further.

It was a mystery to me that, if the cargo was going to be unloaded in Trinidad, why Trinidad was not equally a target of ours as Venezuela was. But clearly, it has not been. But it looked like somewhere in Venezuela (not made public), there were folks packaging cocaine and putting it on small fishing boats, and sending the cocaine to Trinidad, where it was unloaded and, maybe, further processed, and then put on other vessels to come to the United States. Of course, we didn’t seem to be looking for those vessels making the second leg of the trip, which only made sense if we had zapped every one of the boats heading from Venezuela to Trinidad.

But then I heard two more things. I heard that most cocaine comes not from Venezuela but from Columbia. This might explain why we have also been shooting at boats in the Pacific, but does not explain why all of the Caribbean targets have apparently been Venezuelan. But there has been very little said about the boats attacked in the Pacific. Are they Colombian? Do they have anything to do with Venezuela (which obviously has no Pacific coast)? But Colombia has Caribbean as well as Pacific ports. Why aren’t we attacking Colombian boats in the Caribbean?

That was the first new thing I heard was that Venezuela is not the most significant source of cocaine by a long shot. The second is that cocaine which is trafficked across the Caribbean is usually not headed for the United States at all – that cocaine that comes here by boat in fact comes largely from the Pacific. The cocaine that goes to, say, Trinidad for processing is primarily then shipped across the Atlantic to Europe. If this is the case, then the idea that we are saving American children by sinking Venezuelan boats and killing Venezuelan crew members becomes even more absurd. And of course, the administration’s trying to tie this in with fentanyl is even sillier

To cap this off, yesterday I read that the boat that was “two-tapped” (or maybe “four-tapped”) was not even heading from Venezuela to Trinidad. I heard that it was going to Suriname, a somewhat longer trip than the short one to Trinidad, but one which hugs the shore and forms a standard stop on the way to Europe. This would mean that everything we had been told about the route of this boat before was false, and that if this boat (and maybe all the boats we have hit in the Caribbean) was heading east to Suriname and not north to Trinidad, it would (a) explain why we haven’t been hitting sites in Trinidad or boats leaving Trinidad, and (b) make it even more clear that this cocaine (assuming the boats had cocaine) was in fact destined for Europe, and not the United States.

So, what to make of all of this? First, that we really aren’t trying to save American children, who are not the prime cocaine customers anyway, but that for some reason we are tracking these Venezuelan ships rather than going after ships heading for the United States. Secondly and especially as we are building up our forces in the Caribbean, all this really is is a diversion for the American public while we prepare for war against the Maduro regime in Venezuela, with the Nobel-winning, Trump-supporting Venezuelan opposition leader waiting in Colombia for her opportunity to take over the country. The poor Venezuelan boatmen are just unfortunate and completely unimportant collateral damage.

Of course, attacking Venezuela to bring about regime change might just wind up to be another Bay of Pigs. And it just may cause our Peace President his Nobel Prize.

Worser and worser.

(Gotta run, late for our morning activities. No time to proof. Sorry.)