Donald Trump uses surrogate Marco Rubio to spread horrible lies about Democrats by using rants about "isms" of unknown origin

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe, by 

Stephen Kinzer, a senior fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.  
Marco Rubio got it wrong❗
How the secretary of state warped the meaning of a proud American tradition.

In a fire-and-brimstone speech last month that often bordered on the bizarre, Secretary of State Marco Rubio identified “a distinctive and unique evil.” Rubio ranted and called it “far-left terrorism” and asserted that it poses a “serious threat” to the United States.

“It is time for the people of the civilized world to defend ourselves,” Rubio told an audience at the State Department, “to stand united against this encroaching darkness, and fight for what is ours.”

Much of Rubio’s speech was a boiler-plate rant reflecting Donald Trump’s cultist obsessions. Its central premise is dubious at best, since “far-left terrorism” is in fact quite low on the list of dangers that face the United States and the world. The oddest piece of this speech, though, was Rubio’s mention of anti-imperialists as part of the evil coalition.

“They can call themselves 🤥anti-capitalist or 🤥anti-imperialist or 🤥communist or 🤥anarchist or 🤥Marxist, but the fundamental character is always the same,” he asserted. “It is a 🤥poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation.”  💩💩💩❗

TRUTH❗ Anti-imperialism has no relation to communism, anarchism, or Marxism. In fact, anti-imperialism is a rich American tradition. Especially at this point in our American history, it should be taken seriously. Rubio has every right to embrace the imperial idea. Other Americans, however, have an equal right to oppose it without being demonized as allies of communists or anarchists.

Debate over imperialism is as old as our Republic. It addresses a profound question: Should the United States seek to impose its will on foreign nations or allow them to go their own way❓

George Washington warned future generations of Americans not to become involved in “obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests.” John Quincy Adams declared that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” 

Abraham Lincoln opposed the American invasion of Mexico in the 1840s, and Ulysses Grant called it “a wicked war.”

The widest-ranging debate over imperialism exploded in 1898, when the United States set out to crush Spanish power in the Philippines, Guam, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. 

Massachusetts was the epicenter of opposition.

Headquartered in an office near what is now Liberty Square in Boston’s financial district, the Anti-Imperialist League became a major force in American life. It was headed by George Boutwell, a former Massachusetts governor. Its eminent supporters included Andrew Carnegie, the richest man in the United States; Samuel Gompers, the country’s most prominent labor leader; former president Grover Cleveland, who had unsuccessfully opposed the annexation of Hawaii; and Mark Twain, who forthrightly declared: “I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

In the debate over whether the United States should begin imposing its will abroad, the most powerful arguments were presented by the two US senators from Massachusetts. George Frisbie Hoar called it “the greatest question ever discussed in this Chamber from the beginning of the Government” and colorfully denounced the rising imperialists: “You have no right at the cannon’s mouth to impose on an unwilling people your Declaration of Independence and your Constitution and your notions of freedom and notions of what is good!”

To this, the silver-tongued internationalist Henry Cabot Lodge had an equally powerful response. The United States, he said, “has a great mission in the world — a mission of good, a mission of freedom. I would have it fulfill what I think is its manifest destiny.”

Senators voted narrowly to ratify the treaty by which the United States turned the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico into American colonies. Anti-imperialists appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the Constitution gives the government no power to impose its will on foreign lands. The Court rejected their argument by a 5-4 margin. In a ringing dissent, Chief Justice Melvin Fuller wrote that overseas military expeditions are “wholly inconsistent with the spirit and genius, as well as with the words, of the Constitution.”

This debate reemerged repeatedly. Following World War II, Senator Robert Taft, known as “Mr. Republican,” opposed the creation of NATO because “the building up of a great army surrounding Russia” would set off “an inevitable arms race.” Debates over US intervention in Vietnam and Iraq also echoed those of the late 19th century.

Anarchism and Marxism are ideas that came to the United States from Europe. Neither ever found much support. Anti-imperialism is the opposite: a homegrown ideology that has long been embraced by a significant minority of Americans. 

Rather than a “far-left” idea, it is essentially a conservative one. It argues for humility, restraint, and limits on America’s role in the world. Liberal utopianism is what drives the idea that American intervention in other countries will ultimately lead to peace and prosperity for all.

Lumping anti-imperialism with communism also reflects a deep misunderstanding of history. Countries that have proclaimed themselves Communist, notably China and the Soviet Union, were built on imperial conquest at least as fully as the United States was.

Whether “far-left terrorism” is truly the deep threat that Secretary Rubio perceives may be debated. So may the question of whether the United States should seek to project military power around the world. To describe anti-imperialism as a form of 🤥 “far-left terrorism,” however, is a slander that ignores American history.

Donald Trump only wakes up when he can bully, lie and denigrate Americans and people he wrongly perceives as being weak

Echo opinion letter published in The Virginian Pilot newspaper:

Trump’s ugly coercive style rarely has positive results

Donald Trump is the American bully — and nobody likes a bully. Throughout his political career, his communication style has heavily relied on public humiliation, aggressive behavior and personal attacks. When dealing with individuals — including political rivals, journalists and private citizens — he frequently uses derogatory nicknames and targeted social media campaigns to isolate and disparage his targets.

Internationally, this confrontational approach translates into a transactional foreign policy — everything is a deal.

What kind of deal can he make❓ Rather than relying on diplomacy using professional negotiators, he frequently uses public threats, tariffs and the withholding of foreign aid to pressure both adversaries and allies. This behavior often undermines international agreements and strains traditional diplomatic alliances.

This pattern is starkly visible in Latin America, where his playbook is designed to force sovereign nations into submission. His approach in Venezuela was to arrest President Nicolas Maduro on narco-terrorism charges and then dictate the terms under which Venezuela can participate in global oil markets. 

In Cuba, he has boasted about an imminent friendly takeover or military intervention. Trump recently used federal indictments against former Cuban President Raul Castro to try to force political collapse in the country.

This bullying coercive style usually just makes people mad and want to dig in their heels. It rarely results in positive outcomes.

From David M. Grochmal, in Virginia Beach, Virginia

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are supporting maniac threats to destroy an entire Iranian civilization

Echo essay in The New Yorker magazine: In his April 2026 reporting, David Remnick frames the second term of Donald Trump as a profound global threat, characterizing the administration's actions as a "strategic failure and moral calamity". Remnick's analysis focuses on the degradation of democratic norms and international stability.

#ImpeachTrumpNOW❗

Trump’s Strategic and Moral Failure in Iran

From the first day of his failed administration beginning in 2016 and continuing the second term in 2024, Trump has posed an emergency to both his country and the world. April 10, 2026

Not many years ago, a ruthless man with an uneasy mind took power in his country and created a cult of personality. 

In the center of the capital, he erected a gold statue of himself that rotated with the sun. He stashed billions in a foreign bank. He closed the academy of sciences, the ballet, the philharmonic, the circus, and all provincial libraries. His autobiography became the nation’s spiritual guide. He banned dogs from the capital for their “unappealing odor.” He renamed the months: January for himself, April for his mother. He was fond of melons. The second Sunday of August became National Melon Day. Such was the world of Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan’s leader from 1985, until his death in 2006, by cardiac arrest. 

For the Turkmen people, there was nothing comical about life under his dictatorship. He barred dissent and packed his jails with prisoners of conscience. The only consolation was that he could not impose his grandiosity on the globe.

Donald Trump, by contrast, has, from the first day of his administration, posed an emergency to both our country and the world, even as he has ceaselessly invoked the language of “emergency” to inflate threats, suspend norms, and expand his own power. A decade ago, he was already making statements that flouted the ordinary standards of adult behavior. When it came to North Korea, for example, he alternated between cooing words of affection for Kim Jong Un and issuing taunts that mixed nuclear brinkmanship with masculine insecurity: “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

Trump embodies the notion that, with age, you become what you always were, only more so. In the final days of the 2024, campaign, he met with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. When asked whether he would deploy the U.S. military if China, under Xi Jinping, were to blockade Taiwan, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me, and he knows I’m fucking crazy.”

The MAGA coalition has long countenanced Trump’s bigotry and cruelty. But now, with the repeated violations of an America First foreign policy, his poll numbers have plummeted. 

Since returning to office, Trump has ordered military strikes on Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, and Iran, and has felt little need to provide a coherent rationale for any of them. According to reporting by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, of the Times, Trump and his national-security advisers gathered in the Situation Room on February 11th to listen to the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, argue for a coördinated attack on Iran. 

Even though the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, made their reservations plain—Rubio called Netanyahu’s talk of regime change “bullshit”—Trump blundered ahead. And, as in the days of the Turkmen dictator, everyone fell into line.

But when the Iranian regime failed to collapse or capitulate, when Netanyahu’s prediction of a national uprising failed to materialize, Trump turned to threats of war crimes and genocide against the very people he claimed to be helping liberate:

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?

These were not the words of a strategist. They were the words of a maniac. And they had a galvanizing effect, though hardly in the way Trump might have intended. Some of his erstwhile acolytes—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones—seem to have woken up to how dangerous he has always been. Yet around the Cabinet table, at Mar-a-Lago, and in the Republican caucus on Capitol Hill, it is gospel that his deranged threats forced a ceasefire and scored a major victory. The President’s war, though, seems poised to achieve little that was not already available through prewar diplomacy, or through some renewed version of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A., the Iran nuclear deal secured by the Obama Administration.

In fact, the original sin of this disaster was Trump’s 2018, abandonment of that deal. 

For all its limits, it had stalled Iran’s march toward an atomic weapon. But Netanyahu, long eager for a full-scale war against Iran—aimed not only at its nuclear program but at its proxies, such as Hezbollah—shrewdly played on Trump’s vanity and his contempt for Barack Obama. Trump destroyed the J.C.P.O.A. with nothing to replace it.

So the war stands as a strategic failure and a moral calamity. The ceasefire is already fragile. “The whole point of this exercise was supposedly to advance the cause of freedom in Iran,” Karim Sadjadpour, a Washington-based specialist on the country, said. “To go from ‘help is on the way’ to ‘we are going to wipe out your civilization’ is strategic malpractice.” According to Danny Citrinowicz, an Iran expert who formerly worked in Israeli intelligence, Trump’s principal envoys to the region, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, almost certainly misread Iran’s capabilities and intentions. “This is a colossal disaster and should never have happened,” Citrinowicz said, noting that it will “haunt the region and world for many years to come.”

In the opening days of the war, the United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and wiped out much of Iran’s defense and intelligence leadership, apparently believing that the regime would somehow give way to “moderates” and “pragmatists.” Instead, the theocracy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remain in place, equally radical, equally repressive, and more determined than ever to acquire the ultimate deterrent: a nuclear weapon. Why give up that pursuit, as Libya did, and leave yourself exposed, when you can, like North Korea, achieve it and deter attack?

Trump has gone far toward shattering what’s left of America’s global stature. His preposterous bluster about Greenland, Cuba, and NATO has undermined the postwar alliance. He has humiliated and betrayed the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky. And all the while Vladimir Putin, who aims to press Ukraine for still more territory, and Xi Jinping, who keeps Taiwan in view, watch the spectacle of Donald Trump for what it reveals about both his instability and the cratering credibility of American leadership.

In the midst of the war, Trump released plans for his presidential library. Its centerpiece will be an auditorium with an immense gold statue of himself. Whether it will turn with the sun 💥🤢 is not yet known. 

Published in the print edition of the April 20, 2026, issue, with the headline “Global Threat.”

Donald Trump and maga Republicans do not see oil revenues after illegal attack on Venezuela and no "regime change" either!

A More Pliant Chavista published in the New York Review of Books by  Alma Guillermoprieto: Donald Trump’s decision to support Delcy Rodríguez as Venezuela’s new leader makes clear that oil, not democracy, is his main concern.

This essay by Alma Guillermoprieto describes, in easy to understand prose, what happened when Donald Trump made the illegal decision to kidnap the Venezuelan dictator president Nicolás Maduro. 

Absract: Alma Guillermoprieto's article "A More Pliant Chavista" in the February 12, 2026 issue of The New York Review of Books explores the political landscape of Venezuela, focusing on the U.S. government's oil-driven support for Delcy Rodríguez as a new leader. The piece highlights the shifting alliances in the region, examining how power dynamics evolve from the Chávez era.

History sometimes repeats itself out of sheer malice. 

For example, in 1898, the United States stepped in to help Cuba in its long struggle for independence from Spain, and won. Cubans were grateful but not yet free. American troops were in control of the island, and the US refused to remove them until Cuba accepted eight conditions presented to Congress in 1901, by Senator Orville Platt. The most important provisions of what became known as the Platt Amendment were that Cuba was required to lease land indefinitely to the US for naval stations (thus Guantánamo), that it could not make treaties with other nations, and that to preserve Cuban independence or maintain a stable government, the US retained the right to intervene on the island militarily, which it did four times before the humiliating provisions (but not the lease on Guantánamo) were repealed in 1934. Secretary of State Marco Rubio—the child of Cuban émigrés—must know the Platt Amendment well: the text was burned into every Cuban’s heart, fomented Cubans’ fervent nationalist sentiment, and for decades contributed to the willingness of many of them on the island to put up with Fidel Castro, the great defier of the United States.

Until last year, those provisions were the baldest formulation of America’s imperialist ambitions, but Donald Trump has refashioned and extended the terms under which subject countries can expect to live. Moments before 2:00 AM on the third day of the New Year, explosions and the roar of aircraft were heard over Caracas. The US, claiming the right to depose at will the leader of an independent nation, captured the de facto president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro Moros, and his wife, Cilia Flores, and in doing so shredded the principle that makes peaceful international coexistence possible. It was still January 3, when the couple was tran

A buffoonish man to begin with, Maduro was perp-walked wearing something hat-like on his head that Goofy might have loved. Reporters who gathered in haste at Mar-a-Lago hardly knew how to formulate their questions about an act of war unauthorized by Congress that amounted to a kidnapping. (The administration called it “an extraction.”) The whole thing was grotesque and stupid and horrifying in equal measure, and gaspingly unbelievable, until one remembered what the Platt Amendment revealed about America’s sense of itself.

For weeks we had been watching as the US assembled the largest display of naval and air power in decades around the sunny islands of the Caribbean, with the intention, one foolishly thought, of sticking around for a bit, playing superpower at the expense of American taxpayers, and cowing Maduro into resigning. But no, the Trump administration was both dead serious and reckless. The proof was Maduro in his ridiculous headgear.

María Corina Machado, the stubborn leader of the Venezuelan conservative opposition and 2025, Nobel Peace Prize winner, contributed to the disaster. In the months before the July 2024 presidential elections, she was polling so strongly that the Venezuelan government thought it prudent to ban her candidacy. Never one to give up, Machado appointed the aging politician Edmundo González to run in her place. According to virtually all qualified observers, on election day he won easily over Maduro, former president Hugo Chávez’s appointed successor, who had been in power since 2013, and who proclaimed himself the winner.

This was openly fraudulent but not surprising, and it seems to have reinforced Machado’s long-held belief that a bloodless transition to democracy was not feasible. In the first days of the second Trump administration she spoke with Rubio, an old acquaintance who was the brand-new secretary of state. Rubio is a foreign policy wonk and an old-style anticommunist with a special hatred for the collapsing socialist regime in Cuba and for Venezuela, Cuba’s longtime ally and provider of fuel. Maduro would never allow fair elections, Machado insisted; he was an illegitimate president, he was ruining Venezuela, and he should be kicked out—by force, if necessary. After the election she had prudently gone into hiding, but if she were president, she said in online interviews and meetings, she would open the country to foreign investment and especially to foreign oil companies, most of which had been expelled by Chávez in 2007.

Her argument coincided with the thinking of the new Trump administration, which in its previous incarnation had appeared to care little for Venezuela or adventures abroad. In February 2025, shortly after Rubio’s meeting with Machado, in what no longer seems like an unrelated event, the US designated eight Latin American drug cartels—three of them with members operating in Venezuela—as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. 

In August, the US military parked three guided-missile destroyers just off the Venezuelan coast and soon added assault ships, an aircraft carrier, thousands of troops, and large and small planes. In September the Department of Defense was renamed the Department of War, three days after eleven people—name and nationality unknown—were killed in their motorboat in the Caribbean by a US air strike. More than a hundred others were sadly killed since then.

Machado approved these actions. She called the administration’s strategy “absolutely correct” and said that “Maduro started this war, and Donald Trump is ending it.” This was after she received the Nobel Peace Prize and gushed that he was the one who really deserved it. (Rubio and seven other Republican lawmakers had actually promoted her nomination.) But, Trump, who inexplicably thought he was in the running for the Nobel, was not amused: the administration’s communications director, Steven Cheung, regretted on social media that the Nobel Committee had put “politics over peace” in failing to give him the prize. 

On January 3, during an eerie morning press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump made it clear that neither Machado nor González would be taking power: “She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country.”

To give Machado credit, she fought Chávez and his designated successor from the start, and even if it meant going into hiding she never left her country for Miami or Madrid, unlike so many of her light-skinned, well-off supporters who called Chávez “monkey.” (In turn, he took grinning pleasure in describing himself as un poco indio, un poco negro.) 

Machado, the daughter of an industrialist, could have had an easy life, but she chose instead to shout herself hoarse at endless protest marches and to live with intimidation and threats for more than twenty years, sensing that Chávez, the left-wing populist who was first elected president in 1998, did not want just a one- or two-term presidency and would ruin Venezuela. She was brave, but it was foolish to expect that by calling for the invasion of her own country she would earn the invader’s gratitude.

“They stole our oil,” Trump told reporters that day. Perhaps his most entrenched belief is that everything he wants—Greenland, the Nobel Prize, a woman—belongs to him, even if it is deep underground in a nation some thousand miles away. A gripping moment came when Trump made it clear that the invasion of a nonbellicose country had not much to do with human rights or freedom or anything else with no monetary value.

Would he see to it that the Maduro regime’s political prisoners were freed? “We’re going to take back the oil,” he said. “They stole our assets like we were babies.” Oil was always at the forefront. “We’re going to get the oil flowing the way it should be.” “We’ll be selling large amounts of oil to other countries.” Members of his administration listed other riches Venezuela could provide: diamonds, rare earths, gold. But those diamonds and rare earths are found in hard-to-reach, jungle-bound areas virtually ruled by the continent’s oldest guerrilla group, the Colombia-based Ejército de Liberación Nacional, together with assorted other gangs.

How about democracy and free elections❓ “We’re going to run the country,” Trump answered blandly. Run the country, as in an occupying force❓ But who was in charge there now❓ It transpired that the person the United States had chosen to tolerate or support as the new president of Venezuela—“I understand she was just sworn in,” Trump noted casually—was Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez. Really❓ But then…wait❗ Just one more question❓ If Maduro was about to be replaced by the politician closest to him, who was an equally hard-line and corrupt Chavista, then why had all the corpses and terror and fighter jets and hoopla involved in extracting him even been necessary❓

A partial answer is that the Trump team doesn’t care who the ruler of Venezuela is right now as long as she or he keeps everyone quiet and provides access to the oil, and their view so far is that Rodríguez appears to fit the bill. When he was dying of cancer, Chávez chose Maduro—his amiable vice-president and a devotee of the guru Sathya Sai Baba—as his successor. Maduro, a former bus driver and union leader and not, by all accounts, a brilliant man, was soon floundering as the markets and agriculture collapsed, food disappeared from grocery shelves, inflation spiked so high it made people weep, and the oil industry that Chávez had run into the ground simply refused to start up again. Some eight million people—nearly a quarter of the population—left the country, many on foot and with little more than the clothes on their backs.

To stay in power, Maduro relied on the huge network of grassroots organizations that Chávez left behind, systematic repression—a network of spies embedded in those organizations came in handy—and a web of corruption and influence that tied every enterprise, government agency, and illegal source of income back to him. He distributed corruption like largesse wherever there was money to be made. Still, throughout the years, he remained faithful to the legacy of Chávez, the man who gave him his destiny.



The Rodríguez siblings, Jorge and Delcy, are not typical I-come-from-the-pueblo Chavistas. Their father was a member of a militant group that kidnapped an American businessman in 1976. He died while Jorge and Delcy were children, after being tortured in prison, and they were old enough to remember. They became talented professionals (he’s a psychiatrist, she’s a lawyer); she learned French and English, acquired a taste for fine clothes and travel, and is cosmopolitan but also radical. Both belong to what Venezuelans call the Caviar Left. Delcy has been, among other things, the minister of foreign affairs, the head of the intelligence services, and the president of the Constituent National Assembly. Jorge now runs the National Assembly and knows how to talk to foreigners, notably Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell, with whom he negotiated all last year about how Venezuela could avoid invasion.

Maduro appointed Delcy as his vice-president in the 2018 elections and put her in charge of the state oil industry. At once she began to reorder its finances, opened Venezuela to the free market, and indicated that the country would not be averse to some foreign investment in the oil industry. It could be that she is a Chavista though not a socialist, but Maduro kept her close because he saw that she was producing results. The Trump team noticed too. Apparently, while Jorge was talking to Grenell, she was talking to Rubio.

In an interview with The New York Times, Donald Trump said they talk constantly. Do they talk about whether she really is in power or if that’s just a façade❓ Maybe their chats are about the 30 to 50 million barrels of oil that Trump says Venezuela has promised to “give” the US. Or maybe Rubio is trying to figure out, like Venezuelans everywhere and all the rest of us, who Delcy Rodríguez really is, because on one day she will “extend an invitation to the US government to work together on a cooperative agenda” and on another she will claim that drug trafficking and human rights “were an excuse” for the US intervention, “because the real motive is Venezuelan oil.” Rumors are everywhere that Rodríguez, the daughter of a radical socialist who refused to bend under torture, a woman who is known for getting her way and trying to barge into meetings she has explicitly been disinvited from, has signed a two-year Platt-like agreement to let the United States take over Venezuela’s oil industry while she runs the country’s day-to-day business with a bureaucracy and security apparatus that will be left mostly untouched. If so, she can hardly still be thinking of herself as a Chavista at all, for Chávez was nothing if not antiyanqui.

Who knows how long she will last or where her real loyalties lie. Who knows what sector of the armed forces or which generals are willing to support her in the coming months or whether the hundreds of political prisoners will be freed or their numbers multiplied. Who can even tell what Chavismo is at this point, other than some two million individuals linked by state jobs and self-interest. It is possible to read news sites and search the Internet for hours without understanding what happened on January 3.

Trump’s long-term plan for Venezuela has yet to be formulated. He has repeated that the US will be in charge of the country for at least the near future, or “much longer” than a year, he said in the Times interview. But Trump is supposed to leave office in three years. The longer the US is involved in the country, the harder it will be to disengage. Who will have to face at last the chants of “US out of Venezuela”❓

January 3, marked the end of Soviet socialist–style governance, not only in Venezuela but in Nicaragua and Cuba, too; the end of US efforts to be a good neighbor; the end of the ability of democratically elected presidents throughout the hemisphere to trust that they can govern freely. An entire world order is in question, but there is nothing to fill the void, not even a realistic plan to bring back the Venezuelan oil industry. Again: What was it all for❓

—January 15, 2026

Donald Trump lies: Signed tax bill did not tell Americans the truth about how the working class will pay for his 51.8 million golf games

Donald Trump MAGA Republicans continue to lie about everything❗

Opinion letter published in the Olean Times Herald, a newspaper published in Olean, New York State.

At the Right Thinkers meeting on June 16, (attorney) Ginger Schroder stated that every Democrat she’s talked to is totally in favor of massive amounts of illegal immigrants 🤥 pouring into our country. I challenge her to broaden her circle of Democratic friends.

Truth Check❗  Reality❗ Most Democrats I talk to are in favor of immigrants entering our country through legal channels. 

What "Right (extremely right wing) Thinkers do not say is how the Donald Trump administration currently removed all legal methods of entry. Even those who had appointments for entry were refused as their appointments were suddenly canceled.

The website for legal asylum seekers has been discontinued. Not all who seek entry are murderers, rapists and drug smugglers. We have our fair share of American criminals who flood to New York state due to our get-out-of-jail free policies.

Ms. Schroder also found it “shocking” at how the U.S. has been spending overseas. Many Democrats have been “shocked” at how much has been spent domestically. 

Right Wing Thinkers do not acknowledge the high costs of Donald Trump's weekend golf trips that, so far, have been 37 out of President Donald Trump’s first 152 days at a reported cost to the taxpayers of $51.8 million.

You’re welcome, Mr. Trump, it’s on me. (I do not qualify for a billionaires tax cut so my tax money is funding your golf course expenses.)

And how about Trump’s failed birthday parade❓ That was between $40 million and $45 million. That is the same amount as 307 federal employees’ annual salaries and benefits. 

So, you’re welcome, Trump, that was on all of us who did not receive any tax relief in the Big Bad Ugly #MassCruelty Bill.

Most of us would be happy to celebrate our birthday with a cake with candles and maybe a dinner at Applebee’s.

If we’re looking to save money, we could set our vision a little closer to home. Stop #MassCruelty❗ Take care of Americans first❗

From Sue Scott, in Cuba, New York State

Republican memory loss ~ Elián González

Elián González ~ Democrats must scream with the same fervor now, as was heard in 2000, when a young immigrant boy was held in Miami, while his father in Cuba wanted him returned home, after his mother died.

Elián González was captured and reunified with his father

Remember when Republicans were screeching at the tops of their political lungs about the urgency of returning the Cuban refugee 

Elián González to his father after the boy's mother drowned while trying to escape as a refuge to the United States?

Now, with the knowledge about up to 3 thousand innocent immigrant children who were forcibly separated from their asylum seeking parents, the same hypocritical Republicans are reticent about demanding the same urgency for children now kidnapped by immigration ie - ICE.

Elián González (born December 6, 1993) is a Cuban engineer who, as a young boy in 2000, became embroiled in a heated international custody and immigration controversy involving the governments of Cuba and the United States; his father, Juan Miguel González Quintana; his other relatives in Cuba and in Miami, Florida; and Miami's Cuban American community.

González's mother, Elizabeth Brotons Rodríguez, drowned in November 1999 while attempting to leave Cuba with González and her boyfriend to get to the United States. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) initially placed González with paternal relatives in Miami, who sought to keep him in the United States against his father's demands that González be returned to Cuba.

A United States district court ruling from the Southern District of Florida that only González's father, and not his extended relatives, could petition for asylum on the boy's behalf was upheld by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. On January 21, 2000, Elián González's grandmothers, Mariela Quintana and Raquel Rodríguez, flew from Havana to the United States to seek their grandson's return to Cuba.

After the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case, by order of U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, federal agents took González from the paternal relatives and returned him to his father in Cuba in June 2000.

In the Elián González case, the Clinton administration obeyed the law.  On the other hand, the ICE officials along with Health and Human Services and the inept Donald Trump administration are unable to comply with the court order to reunite innocent immigrant families who were forcibly separated as a result of the Department of Justice "zero tolerance" policy.

Zero tolerance must apply to stopping forced family separations.

Trump's Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, must abide by the law and comply with the court order to reunite families, in the same way that the Clinton administration complied with reunification of Elián González, who was returned to his Cuban father. 

Republicans have no plan for America- they just whine

It's sad to read the daily political reports about how the Republicans are critical of everything, but unwilling to solve anything.  

Now, Republicans are complaining about President Obama being in Cuba, attending an international baseball game, when the American Tampa FL team was playing the Cubans. Instead, the Republicans, the wanna-be presidents, think President Obama should've returned to Washington DC. Yet, when Republicans complain about where President Obama was while Brussels was attacked, they have no idea about what President Obama would do if he returned to Washington DC? It's plainly stupid to criticize President Obama without offering any constructive advice. Ted Cruz whines, Rudy Guilini pontificates, but neither offers a plan for improving the Brussels crises.

In fact, President Obama was building an important relationship with our Cuban neighbors, a mere 90 miles from Key West, Florida. Besides, right wing Republicans go into seizures about the possibility of closing the Guantanamo prison where suspected terrorists are being held for years, without trials. Yet, Republicans are appalled because President Obama wants to build relationships with Cuba that will improve our potential to maintain the base located on Cuban property. 

Meanwhile, the terrible Brussels attacks were conducted by terrorists who were, apparently, hiding in plain view of their neighbors. Do Republicans think President Obama can fix the Belgian security system? It certainly makes more sense for President Obama to fix what he has the power to repair- meaning, the US-Cuban international relationship.  

Rudy Giuliani: Obama should have cut Cuba trip short because Brussels was his ‘Pearl Harbor’-OMG: Brussels was certainly not Pearl Harbor. Indeed, does Guiliani know Pearl Harbor is in Hawaii?

Somehow, the Belgians have to figure out how their security was unable to find known terrorists living right under their noses in downtown Brussels. President Obama cannot help them.

Terrorists intend for their horror to disrupt people's lives. Therefore, none of us can let them have their heinous way.  

President Obama made the perfect decision to stay in Cuba while his international team supports European efforts to destroy evil ISIS, the radical Islamic caliphate that's living in their midst, among the population, in plain site.

Trump - Rubio - Cruz: immigration candidates

Republicans who support either Donald Trump, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) or Senator Rafael "Ted" Cruz (R-TX), for the GOP presidential nomination are overlooking the immigration problems these three candidates present.  

In fact, the only two GOP candidates who can prove they are in complete compliance with the US Constitutional requirement for natural born citizenship are Dr. Ben Carson and Governor John Kasich.  Obviously, Carson and Kasich are not GOP front runners, at this time, but they're qualified by the Constitutional standards to run for president. On the other hand, the three who are front runners for the 2016 nomination have issues. In fact, the Trump-Rubio-Cruz standards for running seem to apply to everybody else, but not to each of them individually. Each one will tell the media how they're qualified because they are American citizens but, in fact, maybe they aren't.  What's more important than whether or not they reach the "natural born" standard, their citizenship ambiguities demonstrate hypocrisy about immigration.

Trump-Rubio-Cruz are three immigration-amigos, except they won't stand up for their heritages, to support immigration reforms.

Here's the truth: 

Donald Trump's mother was not a natural born citizen as described in the website https://www.scottishroots.com/people/donald.php

Donald Trump is the son of a Scotswoman. His mother, Mary Anne MacLeod was from the hebridean Island of Lewis, off the west coast of Scotland, from where she emigrated to America and met and married Frederick Trump, of German origin. Donald Trump was on June 14, 1946 in Queens, New York. In other words, Donald Trump is second generation born with immigrant parents.

Senator Marco Rubio - Marco was born in on May 28, 1971, in Miami to Cuban-born parents who came to America following Fidel Castro's takeover. When he was eight years old, Rubio and his family moved to Las Vegas, Nevada where his father worked as a bartender at the Sams Town Hotel and his mother as a housekeeper at the Imperial Palace Hotel. In 1985, the family returned to Miami where his father continued working as a bartender, until 1997, at the Mayfair House Hotel. Thereafter, his father worked as a school crossing guard, until his retirement in 2005. His mother worked as a Kmart stock clerk until 1995, when she retired.  In other words, Senator Rubio is an "anchor baby", born in the US to immigrant parents who secure their residency.  He's also born of immigrant parents.  Nevertheless, Senator Rubio's position on immigration reform makes no sense at all, he seems to slip slide along on this issue. In fact, given Rubio's family's history and their working class origins, he should be a star shining in favor of immigration reform, allowing a path to citizenship for people who qualify under the law. Unfortunately, Senator Rubio won't clearly state what his immigration positions are, but certainly his family's history should influence his opinion.

Senator Rafael "Ted" Cruz was  born on December 22, 1970, at Foothills Hospital, in Calgary, Canada. His parents are Eleanor Elizabeth (Darragh), an American,Wilson and Rafael Bienvenido Cruz, a Cuban. In fact, Cruz's father was born in Cuba, and his grandfather was from the Canary Islands in Spain. His mother was born in Wilmington, Delaware, and is three quarters of Irish descent and one quarter of Italian descent. Clearly, Senator Cruz is the son of an immigrant father and born when his mother was living in Canada.  Therefore, it makes no sense whatsoever for Senator Ted Cruz to oppose immigration reform and prevent a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrant people living in the US, obeying our laws, paying taxes and contributing to the growth of our nation's economy.

Nevertheless, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz speak about immigrants as though they were somehow born as descendants of the 1620, Pilgrims who arrived in Massachusetts, on the Mayflower.

Hypocrisy reigns in the Republican party.Yet, the issue shows up like a failed blot on a Rorschach Test, an image gone wrong, when the leading candidates are direct descendants of America's growing ethnic melting pot.  

Welcome Pope Francis - benvenuto, bienvenidos

Washington (CNN) Pope Francis immediately dove into the whirlpool of U.S. politics on Wednesday, using his first direct address to the nation to weigh in on deeply divisive issues including climate change, Cuba, and immigration as he was greeted by exuberant crowds packing the streets of Washington.

The pontiff, Pope Francis, lived up to his reputation for blunt talk at a welcoming ceremony at the White House, introducing himself as the son of the kind of "immigrant family" on which America was built -- a clear reference to the controversy swirling around millions of undocumented people in the country.

Speaking in English, the Argentine-born Francis also said he was ready to listen to the "hopes and dreams of the American people" and to offer guidance to those charged with shaping the nation's political future "in fidelity to its founding principles."

And in comments that could antagonize Republicans, Francis endorsed President Barack Obama's efforts on climate change and rebuilding ties with Cuba, after more than half a century of estrangement.

Incredibly, less than a century ago, it would've been difficult (maybe impossible) to believe that the Pope in Rome would be invited to speak to a joint session of the US Congress.  

In fact, when John Kennedy successfully ran for President in 1959-60, the issue of the Pope influencing American public policy was a hot campaign issue. Republicans were saying, at that time, the Pope would unduly influence the Catholic Kennedy.  

Incredulously, today, Pope Francis was welcomed to Washington DC by the US Republican Congress and greeted by the first African American President of the United States. Amazing.

President Barack Obama and Mrs. Michelle Obama greeted the Argentinian Pope who is visiting Washington DC during a state visit. This unlikely set of circumstances can be considered a saintly miracle. Nevertheless, the spiritual dimension notwithstanding, the message Pope Francis made today wasted virtually no time in a welcome narrative of nice flourishes. He spoke directly to the hot button issues of immigration and climate change.  

Pope Francis and President Obama agree about two important issues. Both support immigration reform and the welcome of immigrants to America. Likewise, they believe climate change, global warming or the scientific term of the day for melting polar ice caps, is a  problem for the safety of our planet "home earth".  

Who knew, a century ago, that a Roman Catholic Pope in Rome would be invited to speak to the American people about public policies? Moreover, Pope Francis was welcomed by an African American President, with his beautiful wife and family at his side.  

Here is some of what the Pope said:

"....it seems clear to me," (said Pope Francis) "...that climate change is a problem which can no longer be left to a future generation. When it comes to the care of our 'common home', we are living at a critical moment of history. We still have time to make the changes needed to bring about “a sustainable and integral development, for we know that things can change”.

Faithful Christians are believers in miracles. Roman Catholics, particularly, are taught that divine intervention can be the result of a person's sanctity and prayer.  

I'm a believer that Pope Francis has brought a miracle to Washington DC. In fact, he accepted an invitation by a Republican Congress to meet an African American President and exert a spiritual influence with many elected politicians who will not agree with his message about Cuba, immigration reform (path to citizenship) or climate change.

Perhaps, Pope Francis has already performed the first miracle on his inevitable rise to the spiritual realm of sainthood.

When diplomatic enemies become our friends and visa versa - column by John Culleton

"The constitutional provision that forbids Obama from running again also frees him to do what is right without fear of political consequences." 

United States history is inextricably laced with the ebb and flow of nations who were once our enemies but now are among our friends, and visa versa. 

Let's begin remembering Great Britain, for example.
Our nation's founding forefathers would be astounded to see the bonds between the Brits and Americans, post our bloody 18th century Revolutionary War of Independence.

Therefore, normalizing relations with the Cuban nation, off the coast of Florida, is certainly consistent with our diplomatic ability to become friends with former enemies. 

A column from the Caroll County Times, sent to me by a Maryland friend, puts the diplomatic ebb and flow of international relations into historical perspective, by John Culleton.

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." 

There are some things to remember from our own history in war and occasionally peace.

"Yesterday's Enemies" was name of a 1960s TV show.  Indeed, yesterday's enemies can become our friends and, conversely, yesterday's friends can become today's enemies. Here is a list of nations we have fought either in a declared war or an undeclared conflict that are now our friends, or at least our trading partners: Great Britain, Canada, Germany, Japan, China, Italy, Vietnam, France and Spain.

On the other hand, some nations that were our friends, or at least our trading partners, have become our enemies. 

Periodically, the US even invades a country whose ruler is deemed a tyrant, in the belief that we will be greeted with flowers as liberators. 

This first occurred in Canada in the war of 1812. We were wrong then; we were wrong in the Bay of Pigs incursion into Cuba; we were wrong in Iraq; we never seem to learn that a bad guy still can stir up national patriotism in the face of a foreign invader.

Our Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) frequently overreaches. 

Ever since the overthrow of Iran, a once friendly nation, the Iranian people had been our enemy.  The US once had peaceful relations with Iran and its elected president, Mohammad Mossadegh, but our CIA helped the British and the titular monarch (Shah) of Iran to overthrow the elected government. It was all about Iranian nationalization of the nation's oil resources. 

The CIA-managed Bay of Pigs invasion was a disaster. 

Much of the hatred of the U.S. in the Middle East can be traced to those sites where captured terrorists were tortured. In (Culleton's view) no external threat justifies torture of prisoners. We will ultimately be judged, not on how we treated our friends, but how we treated our captured prisoners.

Another thing we keep forgetting is that an irregular insurgent force with a strong motivation can frequently harass and ultimately defeat a better equipped regular army that lacks motivation. 

In our own nation's revolution, the forces that harassed the British and Hessian units were frequently little more then untrained volunteers. In the words of Nathanael Greene, "We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." 

In the wars against America's original inhabitants, the Battle of Little Big Horn showed the folly of underestimating irregular opponents. More recently, in the Iraq war, regular Iraqi units often surrendered en masse, but the irregulars, known as "Feyadeen Saddam," gave us trouble and casualties. 

Currently the reconstituted regular Iraqi army still tends to not show up, but the irregular Kurdish force known as Peshmerga has proven to be the most reliable opponent of the ISIS forces.

But, currently there is some good foreign policy news. President Barack Obama has a firm grasp of the obvious, and it is obvious that more friendly relations with Cuba does us no harm and may help the Cuban people, including Cuban-Americans, a great deal. The embargo on trade with Cuba is still the law. Hopefully, some future Congress will recognize the virtue of being Cuba's friend, and not their bully.

America lost 50,000 troops fighting in Vietnam, yet today we trade with Vietnam. In the Korean war, Chinese "volunteers" killed many Americans, but today we allow free trade with China.

The constitutional provision that forbids Obama from running again also frees him to do what is right without fear of political consequences. The recent deal with Cuba is typical Obama strategy, do what is needed, but in small incremental steps.

If you want bolder leadership then elect a better Congress. 

Or perhaps we should elect a Republican president, and let him or her try to deal with the intransigents on the far right and the cowardice of House Speaker John Boehner. It would be fit punishment for the GOP. Unfortunately, we all would have to suffer along with them when the market crashes because of deregulation and unemployment rises again.

John Culleton writes from Eldersburg. His column appears every second Tuesday. Email him at cct@wexfordpress.com.