A number of Italian friends of South American descent have strenuously admonished me for failing to appreciate and embrace the “heroic” actions of my president in rightly removing a Venezuelan monster, to which I softly reply that without fail I hold to international law and above all to the sanctity of sovereignty. Violating one or both as if they did not exist or could be bent to accommodate one nation’s sense of the right and the righteous is aggression, plain and simple. Did we kidnap Stalin or Mao? Did we raid Havana and abscond with Fidel Castro? Did we make away with Ayatollah Khomeini or even with Saddam, who was easy pickings in 1991? Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic was properly remanded to the International Criminal Court, which this president treats as detritus. A number of other decades and dictators come to mind, but no matter. Suffice it to say that our shameless commander in chief stands poised to deliver Venezuela’s ample oil fields into eager American hands. This I say to my excited, shoot-first friends who have had a taste of colonial-era force and love it. To which they shrug in disgust at me and busy themselves with champagne corks, as I wonder to myself how high those same corks will fly when Greenland is annexed and Iran returned to New Washington’s sphere of influence. If ever there was any doubt, the America-first gang is headed by a CEO in love with mergers, acquisitions, and hostile takeovers, who represents rule by the one percent. It’s money that matters, brute militarism its handmaiden, and there is no turning back.