HarryShearer.com

The administration of the Felon-in-Chief has been insistent on the premise that Venezuela’s abducted president was the kingpin of a vast cocaine empire that has killed untold numbers of Americans. But cocaine is not the mass killer the administration alleges; fentanyl (pronounce fen-tan-ill) is. From USA Today:

“drug overdose deaths from cocaine rose from 12,122 in 2015 to 59,725 in 2023 only because nearly 70% of those more recent deathsinvolved cocaine mixed with fentanyl, according to the CDC.” Deaths from opioids, including cocaine, dropped by a third between 2023 and 2024, per JAMA. Cocaine has been in wide use in certain sectors of the population for decades—show business being one of those sectors—without generating a mass die-off of SAG-AFTRA or WGA members.

One cannot avoid concluding that cocaine smuggling is, for the administration, a convenient stand-in for the real goal of this operation. Venezuela has the world’s largest reserves of crude oil.

Nothing could be cruder.