Senator Marco Rubio had a fine old time Sunday calling for a military coup in Venezuela, and suggesting it would be super-neato if that country's president, Nicolás Maduro, could be summarily executed like in any good revolution. He didn't actually say that, of course! That would be undiplomatic behavior for a US senator! Instead, Rubio just tweeted a whole bunch of explicit calls for Maduro to be toppled, and then a few very cryptic before-and-after images of notorious dictators who ended up dead, or in one case, in prison. Tweeting out bloody fantasies of retribution sure seems like a perfectly cromulent way to observe the Lord's day. For a sociopath.
Generalissimo Rubio's Twitter feed Sunday included stories of hero Venezuelan army troops deserting to join the opposition and tales of international condemnation, all aimed at telling Maduro how isolated he is. Because when Marco Rubio speaks, Nicolás Maduro listens.
Oh, yes, and then there were the Crime Does Not Pay tweets. See if you can detect a theme!
You got your Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian president George W. Bush fell out of love with then arrested (after a wee bit of an invasion).
You got your Muammar Gaddafi, who was deposed by a US-led military campaign, then bloodily murdered (and possibly sodomized with a bayonet first).
We liked the headlines describing that Gaddafi tweet as "cryptic." Gosh, Senator, whatever could you be hinting at?
Later, after people on the internet started wondering if this was any way for a US senator to behave, Rubio doubled down with a third image to remind us of the 1989 "trial" and summary execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena.
The second photo, incidentally, is from a film recreating the execution -- hard to say whether Rubio just grabbed the first pic he found, or deliberately tried to avoid the really fun, gory post-execution photos this time. Look, it's fine, they were tyrants, and as the great Southern hero said, "Thus ever to tyrants," right? Hey, Marco Rubio, you want kids to see what happens to tyrants, right? Here, tweet this you fucking sicko.
Fun! Edgy! Senatorial!
Many replies were about what you'd expect, the digital equivalent of spectators dipping their handkerchiefs in the blood following a lynching. Oh, sure, there were a few liberal troublemakers pointing out maybe Rubio had been untoward:
Gotta love that content warning, Twitter. Also, if you want to get all technical about it, Human Rights Watch says that murdering Gaddafi after he'd already been taken prisoner was probably a bit of a war crime. Not that anyone in the US needs to worry about committing or encouraging war crimes, because fuck you, United Nations, we refused to ratify the International Criminal Court treaty, so we can do what we want.
Also, let us note Rubio also throwed in some Bible talkin', because calling for bloody vengeance on the Lord's Day is what Jesus likes a whole lot.
Pretty much what you'd expect from Senator Marco Rubio, Follower of Christ, AMEN!
Oh, yeah, and there's certainly NO CONCEIVABLE WAY Rubio's "cryptic" messages could possibly be useful to Maduro as he portrays himself as the innocent victim of Yankee imperialism. That's just unthinkable.
To an idiot.
[Mother Jones / Daily Beast / Slate]
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