News of the Restless

“Fellow deputies, I propose that we eliminate ordinary parliamentary sessions, because I don’t mix with ordinary people.” –MariCori, saying the silent part out loud.

I have a confession to make: I was fully expecting Donnie NOT to get the Nobel Peace Prize. So I wasn’t surprised to see that he didn’t get it; mildly gleeful, yes, because anything that upsets and disappoints the orange king-baby is good for a passing snicker. But I wasn’t expecting him to lose it to — of all people — María Corina Machado.

MariCori, as she is known in Venezuela, is absolutely NOT a peace activist, nor is she a peacemaker. She is an oligarch. She is a sycophant. She is a putschist. She is a professional crybaby. She hasn’t accomplished a single thing in the 20+ years that her name has been in the public eye. All she’s done is run whining to Washington every time a Venezuelan presidential election doesn’t hand her, or whoever she’s backing, the top job in the land. And to collect millions of dollars in the process for her astroturf group, Súmate — which, like her, is just a bunch of well-off do-nothings whose only job is to make pitiful noises about the nation’s “dictatorship” every time a camera is on them, or a US diplomat is in the room. They’ve been at it ever since Chavecito was in office, and they’re at it still, now that Nicolás Maduro — a former bus drivers’ union leader — occupies Chavecito’s place. One time, she was photographed in a grip ‘n’ grin session with Dubya Bush, in which her skinny legs took centre stage.

And that is all she and her comical organization have ever done. They haven’t succeeded in toppling “the dictatorship”, because it isn’t in fact any such thing. Madurito, like Chavecito before him, is democratically elected. And while he lacks the ebullient charisma of his late predecessor, he is still far and away more popular than MariCori, Súmate, or any of its puppet presidential pretenders, like whatsisface — oh sorry, Juan Guaidó. (Who, for the record, was never elected to any office higher than a seat in the National Assembly, and was never president. And who, for all the noises about how Madurito and Chavecito are “like Hitler”, actually did take a leaf out of Hitler’s book when he crowned himself king, or rather, went all over the world claiming to be the rightful president and hoped that no one would notice that he wasn’t.)

Anyhow. It’s not as if the Nobel Peace Prize isn’t a farce, and hasn’t been since the day it was first awarded. Alfred Nobel, after all, was a capitalist who made his fortune in a literal instrument of mass death — namely, dynamite. Not exactly the stuff of which peace is made. And the prize has been pretty much a running dirty joke since the day Henry Fucking Kissinger won it.

But, be the award a joke or not, Donnie hears only the word “prize”, and automatically thinks he’s entitled to it. Especially since Barack Obama once won it. And Donnie just can’t bear to be outdone by a black man, because he’s a racist Nazi gangster. And he’s not above prize theft — once even yoinking the FIFA trophy out of the winners’ hands, and keeping it to display in his gaudy Oval Office as if he’d kicked the winning goal himself.

But if you think MariCori is more deserving than Donnie, you couldn’t be more wrong. Like said, peace is not what she’s about. In fact, she’s not above calling upon him and asking for a bombing of her own country:

Far right spokesperson María Corina Machado stated, during an interview with FOX News, that Venezuelans should be grateful to the president of the United States, Donald Trump, if he were to bomb Venezuela.

During the interview, Machado said that for years, the opposition extremist sector has been soliciting intervention in Venezuela.

Machado also suggested that her fellow Venezuelans should be thankful to Trump for his interventionist plans, even if he were to bomb Venezuela.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Machado has made a proposal of this sort; on previous occasions, she had expressed her wish that Venezuela be invaded and bombed so that the extremist right-wing could ascend to power.

Translation mine.

Not very peaceful, that. But it’s very much in line with what she’s been doing ever since Chavecito was in office. MariCori is also on record as approving the revocation of temporary protected status for Venezuelan migrants in the US. She was even among the putschists who stormed Miraflores, the Venezuelan presidential palace, in April of 2002, installing another oligarch, Pedro Carmona (alias “Pedro the Brief”), for not quite 48 hours. But the Venezuelan people turned out by the thousands from their hillside barrios to protest and demand the return of their elected president at the palace gates. And when the army (which was still loyal to its commander in chief) stepped in to drive them out and retake the palace, they all scuttled like cockroaches. Including MariCori, undoubtedly in stupidly expensive high heels.

Oddly enough, though, for a “dictatorship”, there were no mass arrests! Not a single putschist rotted in jail. In the end, the real coup was scored for freedom, democracy…and socialism.

You’d think that someone like MariCori would be permanently disgraced in the eyes of the world, and certainly disqualified from receiving any kind of peace prize. She’s no Henry Kissinger, as she enjoys no real power even behind the scenes. And this prize won’t grant her any true credibility, when all’s said.

But what really made my eyes snap open was what Michael Wolff told The Daily Beast in this interview, where he reveals that a member of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee — he doesn’t say who — was once a guest of the infamous child-trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein:

How that committee member happened to be there, and what was said and done during that meeting, Wolff doesn’t elaborate. But it might go a long way toward explaining how a blatantly unworthy oligarch like MariCori wound up winning a prize that she should never have even been nominated for.