(Dobbs) Are We Missing Something?

Aside, of course, from the moral vacuum of our president.

Have you thought about the irony of this?

Donald Trump is making noise about attacking Venezuela because of his belief that its president, Nicolas Maduro, is the head of a drug cartel that smuggles narcotics into the U.S.

Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t.

But at the same time, Trump just announced on Friday a full pardon for former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted last year in an American court and sentenced to 45 years in prison for helping smuggle 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.

Are we missing something? Forgive the skepticism, but could Trump’s anti-drug campaign possibly be selective?

Have you thought about the irony that after an Afghan refugee who once worked for American forces fighting the Taliban murdered a national guardswoman in Washington DC this week, the president announced in a particularly vitriolic message on Thanksgiving— the man’s bitterness takes no break— that he will “permanently pause” the admission of all immigrants from “third world countries,” although of course “third world countries” are any countries he arbitrarily says they are.

His obsessive post on his website is clear about who he blames, obsessive because Trump is worse than a poor loser, he’s a poor winner who can hardly get through the day without berating the man he beat: “I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States.”

There are three things this snake oil president fails to admit. First, that the whole American exit from Afghanistan, including the blueprint for who we would save from Taliban retaliation, was Trump’s plan, hatched during his first term and executed by President Biden after Trump was gone. And, that although virtually every top Trump administration official immediately claimed that the killer of the guardswoman was never vetted when he came to the U.S. in 2021, Trump’s own Justice Department inspector general reported earlier this year that every Afghan allowed in after the war was thoroughly vetted by both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. And, the worst indictment of the president’s lies: the murderer’s asylum application was approved just seven months ago, well into Donald Trump’s second term.

So now, the applications of all immigrants from “third world countries” are “permanently paused.” Evidently except the white Afrikaner farmers Trump has welcomed from South Africa with open arms because they claim “white genocide.”

Are we missing something? Could his anti-immigrant campaign possibly be selective?

Have you thought about the irony that after six members of Congress made a video telling military forces that they are obliged to refuse unlawful orders, the president openly called for them to be “ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL” and accused them of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

It should be enough that a legion of legal experts asserts that Trump’s orders beginning in September to attack and kill alleged “narco-traffickers” in boats off Latin America are themselves unlawful, extrajudicial executions which amount to murder. Even worse, according to reports Friday, after one of the first boats was attacked by a missile and a live drone feed showed two survivors still hanging on, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth verbally ordered a second strike with a command, according to sources involved, “to kill everybody.”

Executing combatants— if that’s even what they were— who already have been taken out of action is nothing short of a war crime. If anything, when it comes to unlawful orders, executing civilians is even worse.

That was explicit in a statement issued last night by a group of former military lawyers, Judge Advocate Generals, who said, “The Former JAGs Working Group unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both.”

Hegseth denies the story. But like every strike he has executed, with a death toll now north of 80, he and his boss have not offered a speck of evidence to support it.

Are we missing something? Aside, of course, from the moral vacuum of our president. Could his definition of what’s lawful and what’s not possibly be selective? Could his concept of victory in the drug war be the conscious commission of murder?

As a friend wrote just yesterday, “We need to find our best courage and sense of right, or we will find that hell is right here to devour us.” Hell, in the name of Donald J. Trump.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net