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Politics and Culture in Plain Talk.
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Congressional Republicans are, for the most part, okay with the President doing whatever he wants without involving them at all. Why should they worry their pretty little heads over a combined military and law enforcement operation to snatch some guy none of us like from his home in another country? That seems like a job for their daddy. Senators and representatives in Congress have fundraisers and parties to attend. In fact, that’s exactly what Senators Hoeven and Cramer and Congresswoman Fedorchak did on Monday night in Bismarck. (AIPAC and Big Oil can’t be expected to fund Fedorchak’s reelection campaign alone, after all.) Does North Dakota’s all-Republican federal delegation have questions about current or future operations in Venezuela, Cuba, or anywhere else? Don’t be silly! That’s Daddy’s thing, and he has all the best people.
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All the best people were very short on the specifics of what comes next in Venezuela. Who exactly will be in charge? They are working that out. What would be the cost and timeline for improving Venezuela’s oil infrastructure? That’s a question for oil companies.
Lots of oil. It will pay for itself.
The only thing they know for sure is that Congress can be ignored.
January 3rd, 2026 news conference at Mar-a-Lago:
Reporter: “Did you notify any members of Congress in advance?”
Trump: “Marco, do you want to talk about that, because you were involved?”
Rubio: “Sure. We called members of Congress immediately after. This was not the kind of mission that you can do congressional notification on. It was a, a trigger-based mission in which conditions had to be met night after night. We watched and monitored that for a number of days. So it’s just simply not the kind of mission you can call people and say, ‘Hey, we may do this at some point in the next 15 days.’ But it’s largely a law enforcement function. . . . It’s just not the kind of mission that you can pre-notify because it endangers the mission.”
Trump: “Plus, if I could add one thing to that. Congress has a tendency to leak. This would not be good. If they leaked, General, I think it would have been maybe a very different result. But I, I have to say, they knew we were coming at some point, you know? A lot of ships out there, they sort of knew we were coming. We went there. But, but Congress, Congress will leak, and we don't want leakers.”
There you go, Congress. You will leak, and the Trump administration doesn’t want you. You are the tits on a bull, the screen door on a submarine, the knife in the soup of U.S. government. At least the president and his people treat everyone with the same disdain, right?
January 4th, 2026, aboard Air Force One:
Reporter: “Have you spoken with the oil companies about going into Venezuela?”
Trump: “I have.”
Reporter: “Which ones?”
Trump: “All of them.”¹
Reporter: “[Unintelligible] commitments from oil companies?”
Trump: “They wanna go in so badly.”
Reporter: “Did you speak with them before the operation took place about—”
Trump: “Yes.”
Reporter: “Did you maybe tip them off about oil—”
Trump: “Before and after. And they wanna go in, and they’re gonna do a great job for the people of Venezuela, and they’re gonna represent us well.”
The glass-half-full view of this is that big oil companies and Congressional Republicans are kind of the same thing, so Congress was notified, sort of.
Sorry, Marco Rubio, but this was exactly the kind of mission where you can call people and say, “Hey, we may do this in the next 15 days.” Then you can call them again when the mission kicks off. If you are worried about leaks, just keep Pete Hegseth off of the Signal and SnapChat apps. Over a dozen members of Congress knew for months about the 2011 raid to capture Bin Laden in Pakistan. So did hundreds of intelligence and defense employees. No leaks.
In that post-op press conference, Trump also said that the oil companies would be “reimbursed” for their investments in Venezuela. In other words, taxpayers will foot the bill. We will socialize the costs and privatize the profits—standard operating procedure. The simplistic, “Heck yeah! Make Venezuelan oil American again,” will crumple on impact with the realities of the petroleum market and oil-company shareholder priorities. As for the regime-change part, our track record in that sort of endeavor is pretty abysmal.
As usual, the devil is in the details. The press conference had none. The raid wasn’t about oil right up until Trump started talking, and then it became all about oil. How much oil? “Tremendous” amounts. What’s the state of Venezuela’s oil infrastructure? It’s “badly” broken. What agencies will be doing which things in Venezuela? It seems that no one thought that far ahead.
Maybe Congress will get those details for us and hold those agencies accountable.
Don’t laugh—even your appendix served some purpose long ago. Congress can get back to serving its purpose, but it will probably require some surgical removals in 2026.
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Same answer Sarah Palin had in September of 2008 when Katie Couric asked what newspapers and magazines she read. When asked to name a few, she talked around the question.
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