What kind of fuckery is this?

I've been noodling on a recurring bit that might actually recur based on the opening line of Amy Winehouse's "Me and Mr. Jones."

But before I can get to it some new fuckery occurs to render my plans obsolete.  Flood the zone with shit and all that.  Not today though.

Responsible people solicit advice and consent before making an important decision that impacts others.  For example, if your kids ask for a dog you will talk to them and your spouse to make sure everyone agrees and is willing to help shoulder the responsibility.  Similarly, if you want a new car you will do some research, take a few test drives, make sure your spouse agrees with your choice and line up a loan before buying it.  It goes without saying that even more legwork goes into buying a new house, especially if you have a family who will want a say in where they live.  Once you buy the house, renovating it might require approval from your local zoning board and they might require approval from all of your neighbors.  You can't just double the size of your home.

The same is true in a corporate setting.  If your marketing team wants to hire a vendor to build a website they will probably put out a request for proposals and those proposals will then be vetted by a cross-functional team involving people from at least sales and IT.  A smart process would ask the vendors to mark up your form of agreement during the dog-and-pony show while you have negotiating leverage, which means your legal team will be involved too.  And of course finance will have a say in whether the proposed cost fits in your budget.

That's just a minor transaction.  Licensing deals or mergers require much more due diligence, potentially even board approval.

You don't need a degree in government to see what I'm getting at--our lives are full of checks and balances to make sure that no one person does something that messes things up for everyone else.

I assume that, like me, you were surprised to wake up on Saturday and learn that we captured the Venezuelan president and his wife.  So too was the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  

Apparently the US government now runs Venezuela.  Exactly what that means varies depending on who you ask, but it looks like we are on the financial hook to rebuild Venezuela's infrastructure.  But no one told Congress beforehand because, according to Marco Rubio in his official capacity as the-adult-in-the-room, it was "a trigger-based operation" and Congress can't be trusted to keep this type of thing secret:

And that was a very limited and targeted operation.  It is also a trigger-based operation.  All kinds of conditions had to be in place.  The weather had to be right.  He had to be staying in a certain spot.  Everything had to be in place in order for that to happen.

You can’t congressionally notify something like this for two reasons.  Number one, it will leak.  It’s as simple as that.  And number two, it’s an exigent circumstance.  It’s an emergent thing that you don’t even know if you’re going to be able to do it.  You can’t – we can’t notify them we’re going to do it on a Tuesday or on a Wednesday because at some points we didn’t know if we were going to be able to carry this out.  We didn’t know if all of the things that had to line up were going to line up at the same time and the right conditions.  He had to be at the right place at the right time with the right weather, and all things like that.  So those are very difficult to notify, but the number one reason is operational security.  It would have put the people who carried this on in very – in harm’s way.  And frankly, a number of media outlets had gotten leaks that this was coming and held it for that very reason, and we thank them for doing that or lives could have been lost.  American lives.

So the media are more reliable than the Gang of Eight.  And the weather.

Or maybe "the oil companies" are on that aforementioned financial hook to rebuild Venezuela.  Did the administration check with them before executing this plan?  Are they more reliable than the Gang of Eight?  Even if the answers to those questions are "yes" and "yes," who will provide them with security during the rebuilding process?  I'm out of my depth in that regard but it seems unlikely that Blackwater has enough mercenaries to hold off the entire Venezuelan military if some general down there musters control of it all.  I can envision the need for US troops.

We are again faced with the ramifications of the Pottery Barn Rule but this time without any pretext about democracy and freedom, it's all unabashed rapaciousness.

All of this assumes that life is like a video game and capturing a country's president means that you now have unwavering control of that country.  I suspect that isn't how it works.  Moving forward, it might be cheaper and safer if we let Trump scratch his despotic itches by giving him an iPad loaded with Civilization.