Thursday roundup

Have you seen the ever-grimmer news coming out of Venezuela and wondered, how long can it be until this Maduro regime can't cling to power any longer? Well, a large part of the reason for its staying power is the extent to which Russia is propping it up:

As allies go, Venezuela is a relatively cheap one for Russia. But the potential returns on Moscow’s investment there could be priceless. 

In exchange for modest loans and bailouts over the past decade, Russia now owns significant parts of at least five oil fields in Venezuela, which holds the world’s largest reserves, along with 30 years’ worth of future output from two Caribbean natural-gas fields. 

Venezuela also has signed over 49.9 percent of Citgo, its wholly owned company in the United States — including three Gulf Coast refineries and a countrywide web of pipelines — as collateral to Russia’s state-owned Rosneft oil behemoth for a reported $1.5 billion in desperately needed cash. 

Russian advisers are inside the Venezuelan government, helping direct the course of President Nicolás Maduro’s attempts to bring his failing government back from bankruptcy. They helped orchestrate this year’s introduction of a new digital currency, the “Petro,” to keep oil payments flowing while avoiding U.S. sanctions on the country’s dollar transactions.

Venezuela’s still-formidable defense force, once an exclusively U.S. client, is now equipped with Russian guns, tanks and planes, financed with prepaid oil deliveries to Russian clients. Maduro scoffed last year at President Trump’s public threat to use the U.S. military to bring him down, saying Venezuela, with Russian help, had turned itself into a defensive “fortress.”

Look, the Very Stable Genius's surprise trip to Iraq was replete with his signature grandstanding and has given his shills a ready opportunity to fawn, but the Leftist media in post-America has really outdone itself in childish, petty spin on it.  CNN may have been the worst.

Bookworm on David Hogg getting accepted to Harvard:

 I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that Harvard has extended an offer to David Piglet . . . er, David Hogg, the kid who was nowhere near the Parkland School shooting but who leveraged his attendance at that school into a very prominent anti-gun platform. Indeed, in some ways I admire Hogg’s initiative in surfing Leftist obsessions to achieve his own fame, but I don’t admire Hogg or anything he believes in or stands for.

One cannot get around the fact that neither Hogg’s grades nor his test scores would normally have brought him to Harvard’s attention. Moreover, his tweets revealed a young man who is barely literate and extremely ignorant. It is purely his hostility to the Second Amendment (about which he knows nothing) that sees him being invited to an institution that once produced people notable for actual accomplishments, rather than politically correct views.

By contrast, conservative Parkland student Kyle Kashuv, who supports the Second Amendment, shows himself to be informed, witty, literate – and in every way the type of student who would have been a Harvard shoo-in thirty years ago, but this year doesn’t stand a chance. (Incidentally, being Jewish, he wouldn’t have been a Harvard shoo-in 80 or more years ago. Harvard’s had issues for a while.)

Khashoggi came to a grim end that points up Saudi Arabia's capacity for ruthlessness, but this new information will widen your perspective on the situation:

The Washington Post has caused itself a major scandal since it has come to light they and their martyred “reformer” Jamal Khashoggi were publishing anti-Saudi propaganda for Qatar. They tried to bury this in a pre-Christmas Saturday news dump, but that can’t stop the damage this will do to their reputation.

“Text messages between Khashoggi and an executive at Qatar Foundation International show that the executive, Maggie Mitchell Salem, at times shaped the columns he submitted to The Washington Post, proposing topics, drafting material and prodding him to take a harder line against the Saudi government,” the Post wrote December 21.

The ever-thoughtful David Solway's latest at PJ Media is entitled "Is Poetry Really Dead?"

If anything here is a must-read, it's Jonah Goldberg's latest at NRO:

Nearly all of the controversies that have bedeviled Trump’s administration are the direct result of his character, not his ideology. To be sure, ideology plays a role, amplifying both the intensity of anger from his left-wing critics and the intensity of his transactional defenders. Many of the liberal critics shrieking about the betrayal of the Kurds implicit in Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria would be applauding if a President Clinton had made the same decision. And many of the conservatives celebrating the move would be condemning it.

But Trump’s refusal to listen to advisers, his inability to bite his tongue, his demonization and belittling of senators who vote for his agenda but refuse to keep quiet when he does or says things they disagree with, his rants against the First Amendment, his praise for dictators and insults for allies, his need to create new controversies to eclipse old ones, and his inexhaustible capacity to lie and fabricate history: All of this springs from his character.

Derek Hunter's open letter to Pope Francis.