Honest question: Would you feel similarly if the shoe were on the other foot? If we had a hostile presidential takeover and another country, for reasons completely unrelated to that, showed up at the WH and executed this kind of “mission”?

Maduro was a piece of…let’s keep this polite and say “work.” Everyone agrees. Does that mean what the US did was acceptable? There’s a lot of nuance and context being glossed over here.

It’s like with Iran. “Their government was horrible.” Ok, but that’s not why we attacked them. The Trump admin has explicitly said that wasn’t the motivation, but they randomly bring it up whenever they need to shift tactics. It’s a moral appeal supporters use to paper over the political realities and actual motivations.

Edit: toned down the intensity a bit.

> Does that mean what the US did was acceptable?

The longer I am alive the more I realize that power is all that matters, and that rules are nice but only for the peons. "Acceptable" in this case means pretty much nothing and is a word that is philosophic in its meaning. You can yell into the clouds that something is unacceptable or unfair and it may be true in some ethical/moral sense, but it matters none. Power will always win out and if someone came to the WH and did the same thing, then there would only be one reason for it -- that there is somebody more powerful than the US and is able to get away with things like this. The masses would scream, cry and maybe some would be happy, but it wouldn't matter whatsoever. Maduro might have been bad (a great excuse for the masses to avoid revolts) but ultimately, the government made a decision to do it and that's that.

I thought that already happened in the US and that's how we ended up with this current mess..?

In this scenario, is the person in the Oval Office a rapist, child molester, serial fraudster, corruptly manipulating stock markets, steering government money to his children’s own weapons companies, assassinating other world leaders, committing the war crime of declaring no quarter, committing the war crime of threatening to destroy all significant civilian infrastructure in another sovereign nation, committing the war crime of threatening genocide, and threatening the use of nuclear weapons in a preemptive military action?

> Maduro was a piece of…let’s keep this polite and say “work.” Everyone agrees. Does that mean what the US did was acceptable?

Maduro was replaced by his equally unelected second. It is not as if Venezuela became democracy or something. Instead, a bunch of leaders got promotion including the main torturer.

I find it mind boggling that it is called regime change. Regime remained in place.