Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has a heap of problems: images of his thugs attacking unarmed protesters across the globe, John Kerry’s “concern” about his disregard for human rights, and his only friend being Bashar Al-Assad. But Maduro has chosen to attack Sen. Marco Rubio, a “crazy” who wants him to stop shooting at students.
Maduro concluded an extended television appearance this weekend in which, for an hour, he claimed that the world was supporting the Venezuelan government and that the usual cabal of CIA operatives and assorted “fascists” were behind the ongoing unarmed student protests. He made the bizarre choice to end the program with a sharp attack against Sen. Rubio, whom he said “we should show to the people.”
Claiming that Sen. Rubio was “one of the corrupt bandit politicians” linked to former Cuban American CIA operative and popular object of radical left fascination, Luis Posada Carriles, Maduro called Sen. Rubio “the craziest of the crazies.”
“This crazy we have as a fugitive here is a breastfeeding baby next to this crazy,” he added, comparing the Senator to retired Venezuelan general Ángel Vivas, who is currently in the middle of an armed standoff against national guardsmen in his home.
Maduro read Sen. Rubio’s comments from his Twitter account and called them a prefabricated “screenplay.” He argued, “These senators don’t know the world; they just get sent screenplays.” He went on to say that “the people who send in the screenplays already knew that there would be deaths everywhere on February 12th and this is the accusation they had ready.” Maduro has repeatedly blamed the CIA for staging student killings to further the United States’ agenda.
Watch the video (via Huffington Post) below. The comments about Rubio begin at the one hour and fifteen minute mark:
Sen. Rubio’s jabs at the Venezuelan government appear to have gotten to Maduro. The Senator has been using Twitter to communicate broadly with supporters and the anti-socialist Venezuelan student opposition movement since the beginning of this latest stretch of rallies that resulted in the arrest of opposition leader Leopoldo López. His initial message to Venezuelans read: “Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his hitmen should know that the world is watching, and that they will be held accountable for their cruelty and their violations of human rights.”
Sen. Rubio continued to attack Maduro on Twitter all week, calling him an “unstable puppet” of the Castro regime and attacking “some in the U.S. media and liberal politicians” for refusing to denounce the killings and violent attacks on unarmed protesters in Venezuela. As of February 23rd, ten anti-government Venezuelan students, all in their twenties, have been killed–including two women killed by gunshots to the face. Opposition leader Henrique Capriles Radonski reported Sunday that there have been at least 500 incidents of human rights abuses by government military against protesters.
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