The ones that (almost) got away.

No matter how much I try to ignore the Democrats’ latest “The Walls Are Closing In” spectacle, it has come to my attention that liberals are hopping mad about our military killing two Venezuelan drug traffickers.

Cocaine has killed 100,000 Americans in the last 20 years. Venezuela is a major player in the supply chain that brings it here. But Democrats are concerned with the safety and well-being of the narco-terrorists. Of course, Democrats also root for cop-killers, serial rapists, wife-beaters, drug kingpins, cold-blooded killers and Ana Navarro.

Liberals are OK with killing people unless it’s good for America. They want our military sticking its nose into every bar fight around the globe, while leaving the bad guys in our hemisphere alone.

That’s how we remain a “great power” that is “engaged in the world,” and, at the same time, create opportunities for Council on Foreign Relations types to go on TV and explain the differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims (no one cares), the strategic importance of the Donbas (no one cares), and the history of ethnic hatreds in the Balkans (no one cares).

Democrats have presented a scrolling series of defenses for the narco banditos that will surely be abandoned for all-new idiotic arguments next week, but these are the current favorites:

1. The two (briefly) surviving narco-terrorists should have been “rescued” as soon as they were “unable to continue their mission.”

Their boat was hit. How’re you going to traffic drugs when your boat has a hole in it? As put by the Former JAGs Working Group (JAGs who were summarily fired by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth back in February), the Venezuelans “were rendered unable to continue their mission” after the first strike, and therefore it was a “war crime” for our troops not to rescue them. (Killing them, I gather, was absolutely off the table.)

I’m just glad the Former JAGs Working Group wasn’t advising SEAL Team Six when they burst into Osama bin Laden’s lair.

Can’t you just blind him? How about shooting him in the leg? No jihadist will take seriously a one-legged mastermind who can’t even see that he’s boring everyone with his “Great Satan” speeches.

In 2001, al-Qaida killed 3,000 Americans. In response, we went to war with two countries for the next 20 years. In 2023, cocaine killed nearly 30,000 Americans, and liberals are convening war trials because Trump is doing something about it.

2. Venezuela’s drug boats aren’t even coming to the U.S.!

As NBC News exulted, so much for “the administration’s stated rationale for its strikes against suspected drug-smuggling boats.”

Yes, that’s true. Venezuelan drug traffickers aren’t shipping cocaine to the U.S. They’re shipping it to Mexico, where it will be trucked into the U.S.

The entire government of Venezuela is a drug cartel. Their No. 1 export is cocaine. Their No. 2 export is cocaine boats. The national coat of arms is a coke spoon and two straws.

Under President Barack Obama, U.S. attorneys in Miami and New York indicted some of that country’s top military and law enforcement officials, accusing them of working with Colombian drug kingpins to move drugs through Venezuela to the United States.

Nothing changed. Venezuela continued working with the Colombian cartels, and virtually the same indictments were handed up during the first Trump administration, charging government officials with enriching themselves by flooding “the United States with cocaine and inflict[ing] the drug’s harmful and addictive effects on users in this country.”

It’s pretty clear by now — to borrow one of liberals’ favorite locutions — we’re not going to indict our way out of this.

3. Venezuela doesn’t even manufacture fentanyl!

Nobody said it did. OK — Trump said it, but he also said American employers need hundreds of thousands more H-1B visa holders and universities need 200,000 more Chinese communist spies — I mean “students.”

Sorry to mess with your head, but the president often lacks precision in his thinking.

This is what Secretary Hegseth said about the operation being commanded by him and run out of his department:

“Today, I’m announcing Operation SOUTHERN SPEAR. … [T]his mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people. The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood — and we will protect it.”

He said it on X. You can look it up.

4. Just before our military vaporized them, the two Venezuelan drug traffickers shouted, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” — or something to that effect.

I’m suspicious of this one, but let’s pretend it’s true.

How many innocent civilians died in U.S.-led NATO bombing of the Balkans? (500 to 5,000.) How about Hillary’s great idea to launch bombing raids on Libya? (At least 72.) And those were true innocents, not guilty-as-hell drug traffickers one moment, then, 10 seconds later, CIVILIANS!

I guess those other civilian deaths were just the price of being a great power engaging with the world.

You’re welcome, Council on Foreign Relations.

What do liberals come up with next? Some suggestions: The Venezuelans come from impoverished backgrounds, they have low IQs, they ate too much processed food as children, they had no idea it was cocaine, they fell in with a bad crowd, they were only the lookouts, their defense lawyer screwed them, and “systemic racism.”

Also, it’s Trump’s fault. Those cholos never would have been trafficking drugs in the first place if Trump hadn’t shut down President Joe Biden’s conveyor belt from the shantytowns of Caracas into the warm bath of the American welfare state. Instead, they would have been staging armed takeovers of apartment complexes in Colorado.

COPYRIGHT 2025 ANN COULTER