Rand Paul - 15 Oct

For Kelley

In the dream you are gone

Every time

Not left

but mostly just erased

Your face flutters

Dances blurs

Approaches and recedes

I struggle

but cant bring you into focus

For whatever reason

I let you get away

one phone call

One bloody phone call

Why didnt I make that call?

you slip away

gravity pulls me under

Into an alternate universe

Where neither light nor love escape

A terrible what if

Consumes me

Till I wake beside you

And realize

I must have made that call

It was one of those long-winded speeches in front of thousands of goose-stepping soldiers that seem to be a signature performance in authoritarian regimes. The parade stands along Caracass Avenida Bolivar are filled with posturing Venezuelan government officials and generals.

As President Nicolas Maduro steps to the podium, unbeknownst to him, two DJI M600 drones speed toward him. These drones are typically used by professional photographers and can carry about thirteen pounds but have a battery life of only sixteen minutes.

The two drones speeding toward the dais each carry a payload of 2.2 pounds of plastic explosives. While they are not military drones, their intent is the sameassassination.

As Maduros speech plods on, his wife is the first to react. She glances quickly upward and her face registers horror at the six-rotor beast hovering above them in the sky before the first explosion occurs. It takes a second or two for Maduro to digest that the fire blast was meant for him.

All hell breaks loose. Seconds later, a second drone detonates down the street into the Don Eduardo apartment block. The parading soldiers break ranks and run helter-skelter. Maduros security team screens him from the direction of the explosions with large cloth-covered shields.

Though seven soldiers are injured, the socialist dictator of Venezuela is unharmed. Maduro later told reporters: That drone was coming for me but there was a shield of love. I am sure I will live for many more years.

Who would want to kill President Maduro, the leader of a socialist paradise that Hollywood star Sean Penn once claimed had alleviated 80 percent of the poverty in Venezuela?

Perhaps it was the sixteen-year-old girl who leads a gang that fights rival gangs for control of an operation that sifts through garbage for edible food. Or perhaps it is one of the young men from Chacao who hunt dogs and cats in the street and pigeons in the plaza to eat.

Id like to know what Sean Penn would say to Lis Torrealba, nineteen, a Venezuelan refugee who fled to Colombia with her one-year-old daughter in a desperate attempt to escape starvation in Venezuela. She is one of more than a million Venezuelans who have done the same. Megan Janetsky, in an article for USA Today, wrote of the effects of lack of food and medicine, and of hyperinflation. She quoted Torrealba, The money in our country, I couldnt even buy candy if I wanted to.... I cant buy anything, if theres something you need. You would need a stack of money to even pay for a tomato. You would need a big stack of money.

Or maybe the attackers are related to one of the hundreds of political dissidents held without trial in Venezuelan jails. The attackers could be related to the thousands dying of curable infectious diseases in a country whose hospitals are filthy and crumbling. Nicholas Casey reported in the New York Times:

Hospital wards have become crucibles where the forces tearing Venezuela apart have converged. Gloves and soap have vanished from some hospitals. Often, cancer medicines are found only on the black market. There is so little electricity that the government works only two days a week to save what energy is left.

At the University of the Andes Hospital in the mountain city of Mrida, there was not enough water to wash blood from the operating table. Doctors preparing for surgery cleaned their hands with bottles of seltzer water.

It is like something from the 19th century, said Dr. Christian Pino, a surgeon at the hospital.

The attackers really could be any one of Venezuelas citizenry who have lost on average almost twenty pounds from lack of food.

But this is not the story of who tried to kill Maduro with a homemade explosive drone. Rather, this is the story of an evil that inevitably and inexorably leads to poverty, starvation, and ultimately violence. This is a story of the continued false allure and sophistry of an evil that has killed millions of people and even today threatens a new generation of the naive.

This is the story of an evil well documented and yet still somehow enticing, even in America. This is the story of socialism in all its drab and dreary machinelike destruction of individual thought, creativity, and ambition. This is the story of socialism in all of its violence, bloodshed, and tyranny. It is a cautionary tale of how America has so far eluded the siren call of something for nothing, of an equality determined and enforced by the governmentbut also of how close we still are to succumbing to socialism.

President Trump in his January 2019 State of the Union address made it clear to the growing faction of socialists in Congress that America will never become a socialist country!

Republican members of Congress jumped to their feet with cheers of USA. USA.

As the cameras panned in on the socialist senator from Vermont, though, he did not look pleased.

Trump explained that Maduro had taken the richest country in South America and inflicted socialist policies that brought abject poverty and despair to Venezuela.

The president explained to congressional socialists: America was founded on liberty and independence and not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free and we will stay free.

The most famous socialist in America, Bernie Sanders, pursed his lips and glowered at the president.

Later that night Sanders responded: Trump says We are born free, and we will stay free. I say to Trump: People are not truly free when they cant afford health care, prescription drugs, or a place to live. People are not free when they cannot retire with dignity or feed their families.

I guess Senator Sanders hasnt noticed that food and medicine are completely unaffordable and nearly unavailable in Venezuela. Sanders continues to assert that the democratic socialism he advocates for is somehow different, that his version of socialism will reform a political system in America today which is not only grossly unfair but, in many respects, corrupt.

Sanderss socialism will make the world fair. Yet, nowhere is the explanation of who gets to define fair and what weapons the fairness police will wield when they come.

President Trump is right to be concerned about socialism coming to America. A recent Gallup poll indicates that 57 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of socialism.

What is it about socialism that casts such a spell that people refuse to acknowledge history? Time and time again socialism leads to the impoverishment of nations. Perhaps it is the allure of equality or fairness. Surveys in America alarmingly show about half of todays youth have a favorable opinion of socialism. These surveys link approval of socialism to a corresponding desire among young Americans to live in a fair world. Blasi and Kruse of Rutgers University write that todays youth reject capitalism; what they really want is fairness.

They cite a 2016 Harvard University survey that found that 51 percent of American youth age 18 to 29 no longer support capitalism, and another 2015 poll by conservative-leaning Reason-Rupe, [which] found that young adults age 18 to 24 have a slightly more favorable view of socialism than capitalism.