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I'm Mike Slater filling it for Bill O'Reilly. Now it's time for the O'Reilly update. Message of the day. There's so much to say about this operation to bring Maduro to justice. Someone found a clip from 2019 of CNN and MSNBC. People talking about again, this is 2019 talking about how Trump allowing Maduro to stay in power is proof that Trump is Putin's puppet. Remember, this was during the all the Russia, Russia, Russia nonsense. And they also said that Trump likes Maduro because Trump gets along with thugs and strongmen around the world. Oh, now what? Speaking of experts, the Financial Times said experts had warned that Venezuela's layered air defense network could complicate US Air operations. Oh, yeah, experts warned we just blew up that air defense network and then the helicopters waltzed right in. So experts wrong. Yet again. The left's in a real funny place because they haven't coordinated yet as to why they think this was so terrible, what Trump did in Venezuela. So they're throwing at everything to see what sticks. Uh, you know, they went back to, of course, the old standby, the old code Pink standby from 2003, no war for oil. There's a lot of this violates international law. International law is pointless and fake. Remember back in 2003 with all these United Nation strongly worded letters. International law has been written by our enemies around the world and often enemies within our own government to decrease American power on the world stage. International law has always been written to neuter America. It has made us weaker to the point where Iran, Russia, Hezbollah and China were operating out of Venezuela to kill Americans launching from our own hemisphere. And our president wasn't going to allow that to happen anymore. A lot of people on the left talking about, oh, there's no legal justification. While the legal justification for capturing Maduro is four counts narco terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices. The indictment says that Maduro imported thousands of tons of cocaine into the United states over a 25 year period. He's a narco terrorist. This would be like capturing El Chapo, some other drug kingpin. And I'm glad that it was treated like that and not like capturing Saddam Hussein. To capture Saddam and bring democracy to Iraq, it required 1.5 million American troops. We were there for eight years. Took us nine months to find Saddam in that hole. We went to the U.N. we did the whole thing. We created a coalition of the willing and 4,500Americans died, countless injured, countless lives changed, ruined to get Saddam Hussein. But this president with the Fox News Weekend host Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio and this incredible team that the President has created captured Maduro in a flawless military operation with zero casualties, involving every branch of our military. Launching from 20 different bases, 150 aircraft taking Maduro from palace to prison in 24 hours. Well done to everyone in our military who was a part of this operation. And also, this is what leadership looks like. We have forgotten what strong leadership can bring. Let us marvel at how fearsome we can be with the right vision, with the right leadership and with American first principles. And to those who say this isn't America first regaining control of our hemisphere to make sure that everything operating in it is in the best interest of our country. It's the definition of America first. We'll talk more about Venezuelan oil and how that can help America next. Mike Slater filling in for Bill O'Reilly. Now it's time for something you might not know. Venezuela has 300 billion barrels, billion barrels of crude oil in its reserves, more than any other country in the world. 20% of the world's total reserves are in Venezuela. At Today's price of $60 a barrel, that's a value of $18 trillion. $18 trillion is almost the entire GDP of China. Germany has the third highest GDP at 5 trillion. And the value of oil reserves of Venezuela is 18 trillion. It's also half of our US debt. Maybe we could use this oil to pay off our debt. This has been a pet point of mine for a long time. This is our oil that communists confiscated from America. JD Vance made this point. He said, I see a lot of criticism about oil. About 20 years ago, Venezuela expropriated American oil property and until recently used that stolen property to get rich and fund their narco terrorist activities. I understand the anxiety over the use of military force. But are we just gonna, are we just supposed to allow a communist to steal our stuff in our hemisphere and do nothing? Great powers don't act like that. This is our oil. We discovered oil in the Middle east and Venezuela. We came up with the technology, the engineering, the infrastructure, the manpower. We did every possible thing related to oil in the world. And then 40 years after we did all that, these countries decided just to take it from us and nationalize our oil interest, and we just let them. That's always been crazy to me. Oil in Venezuela was discovered first by Shell company, which is a, which a British Dutch company, and then Standard Oil, which is Exxon and Conoco and Chevron. Exxon's from Ohio, Conoco is from Utah, and Phillips is from Oklahoma. None of these are Venezuelan oil companies. And we just let Venezuela take them all over in 1976 because Venezuela said there ares now 21 private companies, private oil companies were kicked out of Venezuela. Now, you may remember back in 2016, Trump was asked about the Iraq war and he said we should have taken the oil. But George W. Bush, he didn't want, he didn't want to look bad. The code pink activists won. The no war for oil people won. So we didn't use all that oil that was at our fingertips. And now we will. Trump said, quote, we're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, and start making money for our country. Of course we should. As one Venezuelan fella said to those who say that the United States is only interested in oil, I asked those people, what do you think the Russians and the Chinese wanted? The recipe for tacos? More coming up. I'm Mike Slater. I have a podcast called Politics by Faith. Please join us over there every day. Bill O'Reilly will be back tomorrow. Spread the word.
