In the annals of diplomatic idiocy, John Kerry is right up there with some of the worst of them.
At a United Nations global warming conference in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt, Biden’s global warming czar, John Kerry, did some gladhanding with Venezuela’s Marxist narco-dictator, Nicolás Maduro, successor to the late Hugo Chávez.
Here’s the video seen on Twitter:
John Kerry (Bidens special envoy for Climate) shaking hands and talking with Nicolas Maduro at COP27. Maduro is charged with narco terrorism in US courts and still has an active $15 million reward for information leading to his capture. #Venezuelapic.twitter.com/4StKz3zugo
— CNW (@ConflictsW) November 8, 2022
John Kerry (Bidens special envoy for Climate) shaking hands and talking with Nicolas Maduro at COP27. Maduro is charged with narco terrorism in US courts and still has an active $15 million reward for information leading to his capture. #Venezuelapic.twitter.com/4StKz3zugo
— CNW (@ConflictsW) November 8, 2022
According to Fox News:
Kerry was caught on video briefly meeting Maduro, Venezuela’s former president, at the COP27 U.N. climate meeting in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. The brief but friendly encounter raised eyebrows on social media because Maduro has been charged by the U.S. government with narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine and possession of deadly weapons.
In 2020, the State Department — which Kerry led under President Obama from 2013 to 2017 — offered a reward of up to $15 million for any information leading to the arrest and capture of Maduro.
Kerry’s brief meeting appeared friendly and cordial. However, State Department spokesman Ned Price downplayed the encounter by saying Maduro interrupted Kerry during the meeting.
“He briefly spoke to Special Envoy Kerry during COP27,” Price said. “This was not… planned or substantive in any way.”
This is laughable excuse-making. The conference Kerry jetted to on a thick carbon trail is a United Nations hotel and buffet opportunity that’s pretty much a shakedown of rich, well managed countries to poor, badly managed third-world ones.
We all know that the Biden administration is all in on better relations with Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, with a diplomatic team run by amateurs known as the “three stooges” naïvely hoping Maduro will pump oil for them, and make up the deficit seen in the shutdown of American energy production by the Biden administration. Venezuela, of course, has wrecked its oil industry through socialism, and would have a hard time pumping at this point, but the sucking up simply never stops, even as it yields nothing.
The claim that the encounter was not “planned” is stupid stuff, too. All Kerry had to do was not hold his hand out or smile. If for some reason he did, he could have wiped his hand off, the way Kamala Harris did to the president of South Korea in 2021. A hearty handshake for Maduro, but a wiped hand for the president of our ally South Korea? What a message they send.
A third idiocy in this “chance” encounter is that it repeats a previous mistake made by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who, upon their first chance encounter with Hugo Chávez at a global summit in Trinidad, went against stern advice not to shake hands with the Caracas thug. They ignored that, and Hugo ran circles around them after that. Then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton repeated the error in 2011. I wrote about that for Investor’s Business Daily here. Then Obama gave Hugo another symbolic hug in 2012, here.
The U.S. doesn’t even have relations with Venezuela’s current government. It still holds relations with Venezuela’s rightful acting president, who’s in exile, Juan Guaidó. Whooping it up with Maduro, an illegitimate dictator with a reward on his head for narco-trafficking, pretty well undercuts the Venezuelan democracy movement. I wrote about the views of Venezuela experts on that here.
It’s also pretty gross, given that Maduro did the old third-world song-and-dance blaming “capitalism” for the world’s pollution and called for huge transfers of Western assets to his hellhole country as reparations.
Maduro is the guy who created this kind of “ecology” over in Venezuela:
Maduro is really playing up his trip to Egypt and social media is enabling him. He’s dictator destroying millions of lives in #Venezuela, not just the environment, who has no business being at #COP27. Why is he still on Twitter, @elonmusk?
— eric farnsworth (@ericfarns) November 8, 2022
The guy responsible for this in Venezuelan Amazonia is in the COP27, what a scam pic.twitter.com/dHiYG8wEDn
— Guillermo (@Guillerm__) November 8, 2022
There was also the Valdez-style oil spill from Maduro’s state oil company that turned Venezuela’s western coastline into an oozing blend of oily, filthy, toxic black sewage. I wrote about that in 2020 here. There is evidence that the Venezuelan dictatorship has even spread its pollution over to other people’s countries, as happened in Brazil, with the first report of it described here.
Now we have John Kerry, Joe Biden’s global warming czar, whooping it up with Maduro, claiming his happy handshake all just happened by chance. He ought to have delivered a speech denouncing Maduro as the hemisphere’s “dirtiest dictator,” but he preferred to gladhand.
Is this amateur hour or Maduro hour? Why does Kerry keep falling into the same trap and making the same mistakes his predecessors did, over and over? And why the heck is he having such a good time with one of the hemisphere’s most appalling dictators?
