In this episode, Dana dives into the intricacies of international politics with a focus on Venezuela. Hear about daring operations that unsettle dictatorships, all while tangled opinions on the legality of such actions unfold. From everyday mayhem to international standoffs, gain insightful commentary on the forces shaping our world.
Dana Lash’s Absurd Truth Podcast, sponsored by Kel-Tec.
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It’s his life mission to make bad decisions. It’s time for Florida Man.
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That’s right. It’s time for Florida Man on the Dana Show. Dean Lash, Dana Lash Radio on X on Twitter. Great ways to stay connected to everything she’s got going on. Two of these are post office related. One’s a real post office worker that probably is no longer a post office worker. And the other one’s a guy that was claiming to be one. But two of my three Florida stories for some reason involve mail. The first one, a USPS driver in Florida is facing criminal charges for trying to run over a child. This is a real thing. The off the post office worker saw a package that he had delivered to one address. It picked up by a 10 year old on a scooter. The 10 year old was then using his scooter to move the package somewhere else. So the U.S. Postal Service worker thought this was a porch pirate. And his decision for what he thought was a person stealing something was to try to run the person over, even though it’s a kid. The aspects of the story that this guy was unaware of, he had delivered the package to the wrong place. So the post office worker had done something wrong, and the kid who lived at the house where the package was delivered by accident was deciding to deliver it to his neighbor, the place the package was actually supposed to go. So the kid was doing his job for him. The guy chased him in his car, drove at his scooter, and the kid eventually jumps off the scooter and into a neighboring yard. So he can’t be run over. And the postal worker runs over the scooter. Several charges and very, very likely the end of his post office career have come from this. But how insane to be a person that’s delivering mail that sees a 10 year old that you assume is stealing something. And the part of your brain that thinks you should come up with a solution tells you to kill the person. or at least to run them over. That is truly insane in and of itself. I thank God the guy failed. I thank God the kid’s okay. And then when you find out he also delivered the package to the wrong place and the kid was doing a good job and not stealing anything at all. Even more, it tells you how much of a moron this person is. But that’s a Florida mailman doing something terrible. Another guy in Florida, this was in Orlando, was seen breaking into an apartment complex and then actually breaking into the mailboxes of the apartment complex and stealing people’s mail. When he was arrested and he had a bunch of different equipment that showed that he was absolutely stealing stuff, he claimed to be a mailman. I love that part of this story. There’s the cops are arresting the guy who’s got like a flashlight on his head and a bunch of items that he’s using to break into things. They’re asking what he’s doing. He’s like, I’m just a mailman. This is just how I deliver my mail. I don’t do it the traditional way during the day with the bag of stuff. I do it at night and it’s really reverse mailman because I’m taking all the stuff with me. His charges mostly stem from the fact that they found a bunch of stolen things in his vehicle, not just the fact that they caught him in the act of stealing additional stuff. So the guy’s going to be in a whole lot of trouble. But 39-year-old Sean Cronin was caught breaking into both an apartment complex and the mailboxes just to take people’s stuff. This guy is the kind of guy that should probably be chased by a mailman in a car, not a 10-year-old on a scooter. Alas, this guy was also caught, thank God, so that’s very good. And then finally, and this story is nuts. A 20-year-old guy in Florida was arrested after he fired his gun into the air in celebration of New Year’s Day and New Year’s Eve. And the reason it’s so insane is the bullet that he fires, what goes up must come down, wound up in a bedroom of a woman under her pillow. Luckily, she’s totally fine. But somehow the bullet did its own version of the tooth fairy in a terrifying way. I even have one of the homeowners talking about the scariness of all of this. This is a simple fact for a guy that very much loves my own guns and loves our right as a society to have guns. Do not do the celebration thing. If you fire something into the air and responsible gun owners don’t do this, you should understand that it will come down and horrible stuff happens. When you do that, people get hurt. And in this case, something sort of shocking happened. Here’s some of that audio.
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About 1158 is when all the gunshots happened around the neighborhood. By 1215, there was bullets flying through our house.
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My four-year-old, luckily, he normally sleeps in our bed. And just by the grace of God, he wasn’t in there that night. The bullet was right there by my pillow. I remember it being very hot. And that’s when I grabbed my son and we went into the other bedroom because we didn’t know what else was coming in. Yeah.
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Thank God, by the way, for all those variables that took place there. But how crazy to lift the pillow on your bed and see a bullet just sitting underneath it. Thank God everybody’s OK. And this guy’s a moron in Florida.
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And one of my favorite pieces of audio out there is a discussion that happened with Marco Rubio about why we didn’t take other people. Why is it that you just stopped with Maduro and didn’t take other members of this organization, of this administration that’s wrongfully in power in Venezuela? And it’s an incredible and strange thing to go back and forth. And this happened with Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation. Because it seems like you want them to be wrong on both sides of the discussion. And Margaret Brennan does a very sloppy job of trying to say you should have done more as her proof of why you should have done less. But that is actually her logic. Her logic is if I can prove that Rubio didn’t go far enough, then I can also prove that they shouldn’t have done anything at all. And Rubio expertly through this in the trash where it deserves to go. And I do have that audio. We’ll go ahead and play the back and forth and the stupidity of the left and some of the media on the left in trying to do anything they can to validate their claim. They don’t care what it is. They want to go any road possible to say, see, this is why we’re right and you’re wrong. Here we go.
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I’m confused. Are they still wanted by the United States? Why didn’t you arrest them if you are taking out the narco-terrorist regime?
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You’re confused? I don’t know why that’s confusing to you.
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They’re still in power.
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I mean, it’s very simple. You’re not going to go in and wrap up. You’re going to… But yeah, but you’re going to go in and suck up five people? They’re already complaining about this one operation. Imagine the howls we would have from everybody else if we actually had to go and stay there four days to capture four other people. We got the top priority. The number one person on the list was the guy who claimed to be the president of the country that he was not. And he was arrested along with his wife who was also indicted. And that was a pretty sophisticated and frankly complicated operation.
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It was.
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It is not easy to land helicopters It is not. In the middle of the largest military base in the country. The guy lived on a military base. Land within three minutes, kick down his door, grab him, put him in handcuffs, read him his rights, put him in a helicopter, and leave the country without losing any American or any American assets.
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It’s literally incredible what happened. The fact that this operation was so successful, so expertly run, that both Nicholas Maduro and his wife are alive, that they weren’t killed in any sort of conflict, that no Americans lost their lives. Like every part of it’s amazing. And the position that Brennan’s trying to take is why didn’t you do this five more times at the exact same time? Why didn’t you apprehend so many more people? The fact that you didn’t do it means you shouldn’t have done it at all. Darn it. Here we go.
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That’s not an easy mission. And you’re asking me, why didn’t we do that in five other places at the same time? I mean, that’s absurd. I do think this is one of the most, you know, daring, you know, complicated, sophisticated missions this country has carried out in a very long time. Tremendous credit to the U.S. military personnel who did it. It was unbelievable and tremendous success. And today, an indicted drug trafficker who was not the legitimate president of Venezuela We don’t recognize the Biden administration didn’t recognize 60 something countries don’t recognize the European Union doesn’t recognize. And many countries in Latin America don’t recognize he was a convicted. He was a indicted drug trafficker. He was arrested. His wife was arrested. Others who are also indicted are still system of court.
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The others who are also indicted are still in place. They’re still there.
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How dare you? By the way, our intelligence told us that there will be turmoil within the leadership right now of Venezuela because we took the serpent’s head, that it’s likely that there will be a fight for power and that fight for power might create an opportunity for us to get someone in power that is much more deserving than the people who are actually in charge right now. You don’t have to remove every individual at the top of a totem pole in order to disrupt the power structure that exists somewhere else. especially when a dictator like Maduro covets so much power for just himself. There is a way to cause our version of desired chaos within the political power structure of another country by removing just one individual from said equation. We’ve already heard A tremendous about face from the new president, the former vice president of Venezuela, who right after this demanded Maduro be returned and wanted proof of life and all this stuff. And now has gone on record as saying that she’s willing to work with the United States because of all the other things that are still in place. The last thing I’ll tell you about this scenario and the reason that it’s going to work as profoundly well as it does is the U.S. hasn’t backed down from its control within the borders of Venezuela, within the waters that surround Venezuela, of preventing it from doing things we don’t want it to do, like oil trade that doesn’t make sense, etc., etc. We still have the same power structure in place, the same infrastructure, outside control that was causing Maduro just before he was taken into custody to say he wanted to sit down and talk to the United States. That was his position just a couple days before we removed him totally from the country was that essentially they were desperate enough to try to have a conversation. We knew the conversation couldn’t be had effectively with someone like this. So he’s not there anymore and he is in jail and will be in trouble for the crimes he committed against our country and against the world. And it is the kind of thing, I’ll just say it this way before I take another break, that mainstream media would normally celebrate if it were a Democrat in power right now. The way this topic would go was that it took extreme courage. It took, you know, an expert operation by the military, which these things are true. The things I’m saying, but they would say them about the other side is that it was the kind of thing that no one saw coming that maybe no one else would do. But darn it, we have to praise. the powerful leader who did the thing that no one else could do because it was exactly what we needed in this moment to make the world a better place. And then you’d see video after video in mainstream media of Venezuelans celebrating the removal of Maduro because that actually is happening. But that’s the way they’d cover it if it were a Democrat in power. They would spin it even if they disagreed with it. There’d even be people out there in media places to be like, well, I don’t know if I would have done this. But it’s amazing that they did it. And I’m purposefully not saying Biden or anyone else because I can’t picture a single Democrat that could have pulled this off to begin with, that actually was capable of any part of this, in all honesty. But nonetheless, that is the difference. And because it’s Trump and they hate Trump, everything has to be filtered through. This can’t be good. That’s the first thing they say. They hear something and they see Trump’s name at the top of it and they say this can’t be good. And then they have to figure out they have to, you know, rebuild their thought process around how it’s not good because nothing he does can actually be thought of as valuable or helpful or, you know, doing something no one else would do in a in a moving way. in a way that you aspire to act in that leadership role. Not the opposite. It’s amazing. I truly thought that there were certain things in our society, and call me naive for thinking this, that eventually people would relent on. They’d be like, you know what? This position that I’m taking makes no sense, and I can acknowledge it makes no sense, and I’m taking this position out of anger or something else, and I need to at least set it aside here. But no. This story over the last few days seems to prove that there is no line for the people who hate Trump at all costs. They’ll say and do anything and they’ll continue to say and do anything, even when faced with the exact opposite thought from the people, people who are actually living in the country and the 20 percent of the population that had fled because they couldn’t afford basic food. That’s a true thing. Look it up if you don’t believe it. But it’s just crazy that this is the kind of thing we’re debating at all. It feels very similar to discussions about how men should not be in women’s locker rooms or you name the topic. There’s so many just simple matter of fact, obvious discussions that we could have about some of this stuff and people celebrating in the street, the removal of a dictator and that somehow still being a bad thing feels right aligned with all those other. How are we arguing this versions of conversations we have in our society? I quick break a lot coming up. Craig Collins filling in on the Dana show.
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And now, all of the news you would probably miss. It’s time for Dana’s Quick Five.
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That’s right. It’s time for a quick five on the Dana Show. D-Lash, Dana Lash Radio on X. Great ways to stay connected to everything she’s got going on. If you want almost nothing compared to the abundance of information you get there, you can also follow at Radio Craig C. That would be me, and I do nothing. I keep saying it on this show while filling in and I’m getting followers, which is awesome. Maybe eventually I’ll actually start doing stuff. But anyway, some things out there that you might not care about, but I did. A TikTok trend is calling for people to have an analog bag. or a purse that’s filled with all kinds of stuff that are not, in fact, technology. This is to better your mental health. There are many people who do this anyway. Twitter didn’t need to, or TikTok didn’t need to tell us to do it. But here is a woman talking about the new trend for the young people called the analog bag of stuff that is not, in fact, iPhones and iPads and everything else.
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Crossword is so fun to pull out at your coffee shop in lieu of your phone. You need another thing to replace a bad habit. I have to have something else to grab and knitting is really good for that. Polaroid flip and some extra film. Do I really want to take a picture? Usually it’s like, I don’t actually need this. 16,000 photos I have. Affordable watercolor set. So fun.
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One of those things that she was referencing was an actual portable camera, which makes you less likely to take a photo of something if it’s something you actually have to go get developed compared to something you have in your phone. Crossword puzzles, knitting apparently is her thing. Anything else out there? Young people apparently doing this more and more. Another story that I saw that I thought was a great McDonald’s is facing a class action lawsuit over the McRib. Apparently, people are saying it has no rib meat in it, which I’m not remotely surprised by that and do not care. I personally will not be adding my name to the class action lawsuit because I like the McRib the way it is. Whatever mystery meats are in there. I’m totally fine with that. This has caused the very first McRib commercial to go viral from 1981, which I find also to be uniquely hilarious. Just because as people talk about the McRib, they nostalgically remember when it first took over. As far as the best thing McDonald’s puts out occasionally in the world. Here we go with the original McDonald’s McRib commercial.
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What’d you say this was again? McDonald’s calls it the McRib sandwich. It’s a new kind of cue. McRib? I don’t see any bones. Hey, who wants bones in a sandwich? Not me. McRib is all meat. Lean pork that’s grilled and simmered in a hickory smoke-flavored barbecue sauce. And put on a home-style roll with pickles and onions. Well, how about it? Mm-hmm. The McRib Sandwich, a new kind of Q. It’s delicious.
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By the way, it’s not just a new kind of Q. It’s a new kind of amazing. And it has no actual rib meat in it, which even that commercial seems to admit back in 1981 when people didn’t care. When people cared a whole lot more about the deliciousness of something than anything else. One last story that I really liked that went viral online. A young woman said that she witnessed this. She saw a guy, his girlfriend, and another woman sitting on a flight together. They did not seem to know the third woman or the second woman that’s a part of this group of three. And during the flight, the guy’s girlfriend falls asleep. And instead of falling to her left and landing on the shoulder of boyfriend, she falls to her right and lands on the shoulder of the stranger. And apparently people are up in arms and upset that no one moved the woman’s head, that the boyfriend didn’t actually like accept the fact that it should have been on his shoulder, not the stranger’s. And it caused an awkward end of flight situation. I think that’s hilarious. And even beyond that, I personally think the boyfriend made the right move Because 99 times out of 100, she’s going to land on your shoulder and sleep there. If she’s sleeping the other way and I get a flight where she’s not falling asleep on me and the other person who might seem grumpy is not actually waking her up and stopping her, I’m just going to lean into this moment. I’m not going to do anything as the boyfriend didn’t do. And then when eventually the person woke up, there was embarrassment, there was anger, all that stuff. You just put your arms up and like, what? Did that happen? I barely noticed. This is pleading ignorance and pleading stupidity, which us men do all the time. It’s a great move by the guy. Quick break. A lot more. Craig Collins filling in on the Dana Show. All right. I want to play some other audio. Whoopi Goldberg is one of several people out there questioning the legality of removing Maduro from Venezuela. I want to make sure for the seats in the back that this part is understood. We do not acknowledge the and many, many countries, the United States among them. And it was Biden who did this. We do not acknowledge the presidency of Maduro. So if you accept that idea that we didn’t see him as a rightful leader of a country, we can definitely take him. And it’s not illegal. The only way it could possibly be against any sort of international law is if you thought he was the legitimate leader of the country, which a whole lot of places didn’t, us obviously included. We see him as a narco-terrorist who is harming our country. We extracted him. We removed him. We’re not at war with Venezuela. We left other people there for now, even though Trump has said that if you don’t do what he wants, he’s got no problem coming back and doing some other things. But nonetheless, as far as the legality of this move goes and the likelihood of Maduro and his wife facing charges in the United States, which is happening, of course, all of those things do not seem, at least to a lot of people, to be illegal in any way, shape or form. Whoopi Goldberg, not among them, people who aren’t sure if you as an American even voted for this, which he’s also saying a lot. um many many people on the left are claiming that the right is going to be upset by this or that trump voters are going to be mad about this and then if you’re not mad they tell you that you’re the bad guy but here let me play the whoopi goldberg audio first so while perhaps no one is going to miss a tyrant like maduro no one will is this a
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illegal thing? I mean, who voted for this? Who said, hey, yeah, go on in there and do this? Originally, wasn’t it? He was concerned about the drugs coming in and out, and yet he pardoned like a giant… Kingpin.
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By the way, that’s a thing that a lot of people are going to compare it to. And I’ve seen that a lot, that Trump used a pardon over here and then went and apprehended someone over there. And why did he do one? Why didn’t he do the other? These, to me, feel like desperate attempts to not say out loud the one part of the conversation that you don’t want to say out loud. That Maduro being removed is a good thing for Venezuela. And when you say, who voted for this? When people actually ask that question, I often say I did. No matter what the conversation is, oftentimes the idea that I would have voted for something opposite or something different comes from the people who never wanted Trump in a position of power in the first place. Almost all of those arguments are so stupid. They’re not things that actually seem to hold any water because by and large, what I find is that people on the left cannot possibly put themselves in the position mentally to think like someone on the right. And in order to ask that question, who would have voted for this? Who would have wanted this? You actually have to try to put yourself in the position of the other side. You have to think about the things that they’ve liked that have happened so far that you also said the same thing about. For example, the amount of people being removed from this country who are living here illegally. This is one of the first ones since Trump came into the White House, came into power again, where the left says, who voted for this? And a whole bunch of people out there go, me? I did. And it doesn’t… Here’s another thing. And I contemplated not doing this on the show for Dana today. But I’m going to say it because it’s my own opinion of this thing. And it doesn’t mean that it’s anybody else’s opinion of anything. Just because I happen to be in this chair today and talking to you on the radio. There are a bunch of places right now, Chicago among them, that are reporting a decrease in violence, a decrease in murder, a decrease in all kinds of things. The Trump administration has said that part of it’s probably because they put people like the National Guard into positions of authority in some of these cities, although people like Chicago, places like Chicago, rejected that and stopped them from having an impact. So I’m not sure that that truly is the thing that caused a change. But there’s another component to all this that feels like it’s being missed when people are trying to guess as to why this year, for the first time in a long time, we’ve seen a significant downtrend in violence. And one of those things could be the people we’re apprehending that are here illegally. No, I’m not trying to blame all crime on people who are here illegally from other countries. I know that that’s usually what the left will do, like racism and yell racist. But if you’re removing people and if the Trump administration has particularly focused on people that are doing bad things and try to apprehend as many of them as possible, and then you see this huge down kick. in the amount of crime and the amount of violent crime happening throughout the country. Most U.S. cities are seeing a decrease in violent crime this past year compared to years before. And what’s the big thing that’s different? That’s what everyone’s asking themselves. What could possibly have changed? This feels like the big thing that could have changed.
SPEAKER 06 :
Thanks for tuning in to today’s edition of Dana Lash’s Absurd Truth Podcast. If you haven’t already, make sure to hit that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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