President says strikes on Colombia 'sound good to me' to a working press pool.

Pay attention. Pay attention now. Twenty-four hours after the United States military bombed Caracas and took the head of state of Venezuela back to a Navy ship in a Nike sweatsuit, the President of the United States, on board his airplane, in front of working press, was asked whether he would consider strikes on Colombia.

His answer, on tape, in a voice you’d use to order a club sandwich, was “sounds good to me.”

Sounds. Good. To me.

Buddy. Buddy. The Republic of Colombia is a country of fifty-two million people. It is an Andean democracy, an OAS member, a country the United States has spent twenty-five years and ten billion dollars working alongside on counter-narcotics. The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, was elected in 2022. The man in the photo with the air-defense network was an autocrat. The man Petro is, is a politician with a normal Wikipedia page.

The President went on, unprompted, to say that Petro personally produces and sells cocaine to the United States. The President of the United States. On the record. About the head of state of an allied nation. With no evidence.

I have run a casino floor. I have heard drunks accuse other drunks of things. I have heard bartenders accuse drunks of things. I have heard the night manager bar a guy from the building because he showed up Tuesday in the same shirt as Sunday. Nobody in any of those cases was running the most powerful military on the planet. Nobody in any of those cases had access to missile codes.

The Colombian president, who has at least the dignity to operate in complete sentences, posted that this was not how you threaten a Latin American head of state. He is also not wrong, but he has chosen to argue the etiquette of the threat instead of the substance, because the substance is so unhinged it does not have an etiquette.

Then the President pivoted to Cuba. Cuba, he said, “looks like it’s ready to fall.” In the tone of a guy talking about a tree.

Twenty-four hours, folks. Caracas Saturday. Bogotá and Havana on the airplane Sunday. By Wednesday Mexico will be on the list. By February the President will be talking to reporters about whether he should invade Newfoundland and the press pool will write it down without flinching.

I’m arguing with the television. The television is somebody else’s flight log.